Congratulations and huge thanks to the hundreds of people who have contributed to this release. It’s a milestone for WordPress with a new user interface and information architecture, and crucial new features like built-in upgrades and plug-in browsing.

Polls like the one to the right are now a built-in part of WordPress.com, thanks to Automattic’s acquisition of leading poll and survey platform PollDaddy! Congratulations to the PollDaddy team of Lenny, Eoin, and Jonathan, who have built a great company with lots of users (including many WordPress bloggers) and partners, and they did it with a small team bootstrapping the company to profitability over the last two years. Lenny and Eoin are joining Automattic and will continue to run PollDaddy as a standalone platform that offers polls to any publisher on the web. As a matter of fact, the two have been witnessing team Automattic in action for the last couple of days, as we are holding one of our bi-annual company meetups – this time we are in the lovely Rocky Mountains in Colorado spending time together and working on group projects (you might see some of the fruits of our labor emerge next week).

Special thanks to Fergus for introducing me to Lenny, and to Mike and Barry for jetting over to Ireland to help move PollDaddy to Automattic’s infrastructure, integrate the service into WordPress.com and create a cool new PollDaddy plugin for WordPress.org bloggers. I met Lenny last Spring at the Web 2.0 conference and we got talking about the big demand for polls among WordPress publishers. We started working on a partnership, Matt went to visit PollDaddy in Ireland – here are his thoughts on the deal – and we decided that PollDaddy would make a great addition to Automattic’s family of services. Scott was advising PollDaddy and helped negotiate a deal, and voila, here we are with a great polling service as part of WordPress.

At the camp, I gave a short presentation on the state of WordPress consulting. As WordPress continues to grow (doubling in downloads, pageviews, etc every few months), so does demand for paid design and development services around WordPress projects. Bottom line: we need more WP consultants! I’ve gotten several emails asking for a copy of the presentation, so here are my slides (slightly cleaned up).

#1 piece of feedback I received: the Automattic list of WordPress consultants is great, but getting very long – make it look more like the WP plugin and theme directories with tags and search so people can find consultants more easily.

This is really cool for WordPress because it’s one of the first examples of a network of their size and scope leveraging the power of their community to circulate content between blogs. It’s also great for individual bloggers, because it gives them the opportunity to highlight and syndicate their content, both internally on their own sites and across the broader WordPress platform.