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The New York Times reports that two WordPress.com bloggers, Stuff White People Like and I Can Has Cheezburger, have received book deals. “Stuff” apparently got a $300k advance. The books based on their blogs are due out this Fall. Congrats!

Time’s been flying since we announced our fundraising. That news ended up getting a lot of attention, followed by even more attention on subsequent developments like the release of Prologue and the addition of BuddyPress creator Andy Peatling to the Automattic team. And now we have a major WordPress 2.5 release that’s getting lots of buzz and great early reviews.

At the moment, we’re working on the 2.5 roll out and some promising post-2.5 features, we’re growing our team (in addition Andy, Marianne and Nick have recently joined), our traffic continues to grow impressively (I just checked our Quantcast numbers: 144 million people visited a WordPress.com blog in the last 30 days - that’s a double digit percentage of the internet population!), and after a week in New York I’m happy to report that large media companies are continuing their embrace of the WordPress platform (150 WP blogs at the New York Times, dozens of new WP blogs at Fox and CNN, Fox also run their entire election coverage on WP, and many more). And then there’s of course Stuff White People Like, a break out new WordPress.com blog that’s been burning up our charts, giving CNN’s Political Ticker and the venerable Lolcats a run for their money.