Le Monde just relaunched their blogging services. Their several thousand blogs are now powered by WordPress (they used to be on TypePad). Lots of new WordPress blogs get created every day, but this installation is significant for a number of reasons. First off, Le Monde is the best known newspaper in France, they are highly respected and we are very happy to have them on our platform. They are also the first major WordPress MU (Multi-User) deployment since MU was officially released last week. In addition to MU, Le Monde is also using our Akismet service to keep spam off their blogs and they are the first licensee of the stats package we developed for WordPress.com.

Le Monde joins an impressive list of media publishers who have chosen WordPress as their blog publishing platform of choice, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and many others.

PS: each Le Monde blog will have a powered by WordPress link that points to fr.wordpress.com, our emerging wordpress.com community for French bloggers.

Robert Scoble came by recently to interview me for the ScobleShow. We talk about WordPress, blogging, spam, Akismet, MySpace, mash ups, virtual companies, all kinds of good and geeky stuff. The original idea was for Robert to drop by for lunch. When he showed up with his video gear instead, I knew I was in trouble! Even though the interview was spontaneous and easy going, I definitely felt a little self-conscious having that big video camera pointed at me. Luckily Robert is not only very well informed, he’s also fun and easy to talk to, so the whole thing didn’t hurt at all.

WordCamp was a great day of meeting WordPress people and learning new things for me. It’s very fun to work on a project that has such engaged and enthusiastic users and contributors. Though I spent a lot of the day setting up and organizing things, I did listen in on various discussions and took away the following bits and pieces:

• Several people told me that they would like to meet more fellow WordPress users, for example via local meetups, to exchange ideas and learn new ways of using WordPress.
• International interest in WordPress is growing and people were asking for the status of international communities and how they can join in and help. WordPress Netherlands and WordPress Germany came up as good examples to check out.
• The number of developers and companies who are building WordPress widgets and plugins continues to grow and many of them are seeing strong adoption and results.
• There is a lot of enthusiasm for WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress, and its potential community and other applications. Interest in using WordPress for CMS and other non-blogging applications seemed strong as well.
• Related to the last point, several people told me that they are looking for WordPress consultants to help with training and development projects. We should follow up by creating ways to help introduce clients and providers of WordPress related services (some of that started to happen on the conference wiki).

There was so much more, but those were some of the points that stood out for me. Thank you to the 300+ people who came to the first WordCamp – I have a feeling there will be others in the future!

Matt announced that we’re going to host a WordPress user conference on Aug 5th. Here’s the site for it. The whole Automattic team will be together in person for the first time during the week leading up to and at the conference. Come join us, should be a lot of fun!