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What do you do when your blogging service is slated to go dark? If you're a user of the popular Italian blogging service Splinder.com, you pack up and move over to WordPress.com. At least, that's what Automattic is hoping while it throws a lifeline to the bloggers that are being thrown out into the cold.

Splinder.com announced the shutdown in November of last year. Today Daryl L. L. Houston announced an importer for Splinder.com on WordPress.com that's available to users ahead of the closure, slated for January 31st.

Even though we have lots of tools to detect blog comment spam these days, spammers always tend to be one step ahead of our algorithms. While early blog spam was often posted by robots and easily detectable, today's blog spammers are smarter. Instead of relying on robots, the team behind Automaticc's Akismet spam filter reports that modern blog spam is often written by low-paid workers in India, South-East Asia and Turkey.

Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, have introduced VaultPress, a plugin to plug the backup gap.

Users of WordPress' hosted service have their blogs backed up automatically (so to speak). So if something goes pear-shaped, the content is caught before it hits the ground. However, if you use a self-hosted version of the software you must back up your content yourself, and heaven help you if you forget.

According to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, the poll and survey Web service PollDaddy has just hit the 1 billion monthly page views mark.

This makes the PollDaddy network the second Automattic web property - excluding Gravatar - to reach this milestone. Automattic's holdings include content management system and blogging software WordPress.com, spam blocker Akismet and more.

The most important component of a startup is the team. Not only do you need to hire the right people for the job, you also have to hire them at the right time. Polaris Venture Partners' Mike Hirshland wrote a great post entitled, How to Kill a Startup: Hire Executives instead of Entrepreneurs. After investing in companies like Automattic and Quantcast Hirshland believes that companies go through a distinct life cycle and often the right people for the job change over time.

When you launch a make or break initiative like Windows Azure, you better get it right.

Well, from our vantage point, Microsoft got it right. How? In front of a sea of developers at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft trotted out a group of geek all-stars who showed how they are using Azure to do some pretty cool stuff.

Matt Mullenweg has just annouced on his blog that WordPress parent company Automattic is open sourcing After the Deadline, a natural-language spell-checking plugin for WordPress and TinyMCE that was only recently ushered into the Automattic fold.

Scarcely seven weeks after its acquisition was announced, After the Deadline's core technology is being released under the GPL. Moreover, writes Mullenweg, "There's also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any text area."

Matt Mullenweg's Automattic is quickly becoming the new media conglomerate to be reckoned with.

The parent company behind WordPress, Automattic has been strategically scooping up hot web properties over the past couple years, from its acquiring Gravatar in 2007 to its purchasing Intense Debate, PollDaddy, and BuddyPress in 2008 and Blo.gs this year. Its latest buy is After the Deadline, a natural-language spell-checking plugin for WordPress and TinyMCE.

Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform WordPress , yesterday announced their new site WordPress TV, a place where you can find all things WordPress in visual form. Filled with tutorials for both WordPress.com and WordPress.org, the site has also been designed to give footage from WordCamps of the past a home on the Web.