WordPress.com

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WordPress.com

URL	http://wordpress.com/
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Blog hosting
Registration	Optional
Owner	Automattic
Created by	Automattic

WordPress.com is a WordPress-powered weblog hosting provider which opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. It runs WordPress MU, a version of the original software that allows people to create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge involved in setting up WordPress on an ordinary hosting account. It is financially supported via the use of Google Adsense banners and paid upgrades.

The site was initially launched as an invitation-only service, although at one stage, accounts were also available to users of the Flock web browser^[1]. However, accounts can now be registered by anyone, and there are over 2,491,431 individual blogs with the service^[2]. Registration is not required to read or comment on weblogs hosted on the site, except if the blog owner wanted to do so; but registration is required to own or post in a weblog. All the basic and original features (current as of May 2006) of the site are free-to-use, and will remain so in future. However, some features (such as a CSS editor, domain mapping, and storage upgrades) are available only to users who pay for them^[3].

[edit] Controversy

In August 2007 Adnan Oktar, a Turkish creationist, was able to get a Turkish court to block internet access to WordPress.com by all of Turkey. His lawyers argued that blogs on WordPress.com contained libelous material on Oktar and his colleagues which WordPress.com staff was unwilling to remove.^[4]

On June 4th, 2008, a list of splogs hosted by wordpress.com that had been previously reported by Dr. Mike Wendell, the former support forum moderator, but were still in operation was posted on his blog. ^[5] In response to posting that list, Dr. Wendell had his account blocked and was blackballed by the Akismet spam service.