Zivity, the adult social network and media site that describes itself as a “community-powered showcase of female beauty”, has laid off 1/3 of its staff, cutting back from 22 employees to 14. (Again, 1/3 seems to be the magic number - Jive and Seesmic have both laid off about a third of their staff in the last week).

Zivity is in a unique position as one of the only venture capital backed sites with “adult” content (i.e. nudity), and has raised a total of $8 million. Earlier this year the site scored Napster co-founder Jordan Ritter as its CTO.Source:TechCrunch

Microsoft isn’t exactly known for championing open source projects. So it’s rather surprising (in a good way) to see the company release something called the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which makes it possible to batch install a set of open source projects on Windows Vista or Server 2008.

Automattic, maker of the WordPress blogging platform, has announced the acquisition of PollDaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets. The deal apparently follows an integration project between the two companies, featuring a PollDaddy plugin for WordPress.org blogs as well as an integration within the editor on WordPress.com. Both products are immediately available following today’s news.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, offered the following comment on his blog: “As we started to look at building out our own service for [polls and surveys], it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.”

As for PollDaddy, the two-man team will join Automattic and continue working on the product, with plans to continue to serve polling applications to platforms beyond WordPress. From their announcement: “We are still 100% focused on building PollDaddy support into as many platforms as possible, so you will see our support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc. continue to improve and grow.”

The Automattic-PollDaddy deal follows news last month that Automattic was buying IntenseDebate, makers of a popular third-party commenting plugin. Last year, Automattic also bought Gravatar, a service for maintaining the same avatar in your comments across blogs.

As I mentioned back when Automattic acquired IntenseDebate, it makes a lot of sense for the company to scoop up startups that feed into their ecosystem. Like IntenseDebate, PollDaddy instantly has added millions of members, who can in turn begin using the software not only on WordPress blogs, but on all of the other services that PollDaddy supports. Meanwhile, more broadly, it would appear that the startups with money (Automattic raised nearly $30 million recently) are going to aggressively scoop up those with limited prospects for survival during the current economic and venture capital crunch.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Rumor: Automattic Valued at $150-300 MillionAutomattic Acquires IntenseDebate to Shake Up the CommentspherePollDaddy Has a Baby. His Name is Jr. There’s an API Too.Automattic Assimilates BuddyPress, Moves Towards Social NetworkingAutomattic Acquires Portable Avatar Tool GravatarWordpress Ups Free Storage Space to 3GBAnother $29.5 Million for Wordpress Founder

Although eBay beat its downwardly-revised earnings numbers today, its earnings call was filled with glum news for investors. (Full earnings slides embedded below). After three flat quarters, revenues declined 3.6 percent from the second quarter to $2.2 billion. Free cash flow has been going down each of the last four quarters, and so has the total value of goods traded over the auction and e-commerce site. eBay is leaning much more heavily these days on merchant-dominated categories like autos than on auctions between ordinary people.

Even PayPal’s revenues were flat in the quarter at $597 million. Maybe the $945 million acquisition of Bill Me Later will help reignite growth. Its classifieds business (Kijiji) brought in a respectable $250 million in revenues.

Another eBay business that is holding its own, surprisingly, is Skype. Revenues for the third quarter were $143 million. Although its growth rate is slowing, at least it is still growing, both on an annual (46 percent) and sequential quarterly (5 percent) basis. Its total registered users grew 51 percent to 370 million, and those people used up 16 billion minutes of talk time. Source:TechCrunch

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired Irish startup Polldaddy for an undisclosed sum. The purchase gives WordPress an infusion of polling technology and seems to be justified simply on the basis that bloggers love polls (we use PollDaddy here at TechCrunch for many of our posts).

Automattic, makers of the WordPress blogging platform, has announced the acquisition of PollDaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets. The deal apparently follows an integration project between the two companies, featuring a PollDaddy’s plugin for WordPress.org blogs as well as an integration with the editor on WordPress.com. Both products are immediately available on the heels of today’s news.

more to follow…

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Rumor: Automattic Valued at $150-300 MillionAutomattic Acquires IntenseDebate to Shake Up the CommentspherePollDaddy Has a Baby. His Name is Jr. There’s an API Too.Automattic Assimilates BuddyPress, Moves Towards Social NetworkingAutomattic Acquires Portable Avatar Tool GravatarWordpress Ups Free Storage Space to 3GBAnother $29.5 Million for Wordpress Founder

OnSugar is a new blogging platform with a twist. The service has added several functions usually found on other social networking sites so that it feels like a blend of WordPress mixed with Twitter. For example, on the homepage you can view the public timeline which updates with posts from all blogs or just those you follow. You can also follow bloggers and their blogs and send them private messages (just like Direct Messages).

One of the most useful features is the dropdown menu that allows you to jump from one of your blogs to another. The other menu item (see right image) displays all of the tasks that you can perform on the blog you’re currently visiting. For example, you can create a new post, edit drafts, change themes, widgets or pages. You can also change your site settings or invite other bloggers to guest blog on your site.

Speaking of themes, you can use existing themes or copy them and change them to make them your own. You can also create your own original theme from scratch if you want.

The Start Following link appears on all blogs and acts like the subscribe to RSS feed option that we see on all blogs these days.

When you create a new post you’re presented with a great deal of choices, which is another thing that makes this blogging platform different than most standard platforms. You can create many different types of blog posts. Besides the standard text post, you can also create polls, question and answer type quizzes, quotes, links and more. As for media, you can upload audio and video files or embed them.

The home page has a cool filtering system that lets you display whatever you want to see. For example, you can choose to see all new posts from all blogs or just the sites you subscribe to.

MP4 / Subscribe for Free!

You can select what kind of posts to view too, such as only posts with audio, video, polls, quizzes, links, etc. It’s a unique way to let users manage and control their blogs and those that they follow.

The service might appeal more to women because of its initial look and feel, but there seems to be a significant amount of men on the service already. The platform is different so we’ll have to see what shakes out when more traditional bloggers give it a try. Is it a good idea to mashup social media services with the blogging platform model? I think it is. WordPress and Blogger have made strides (ever so slowly) to give their users more social media tools and functions. Time will tell how much farther they will go to make their blogging platform more social.

Yesterday we posted videos from Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg on the State of Wordpress, a Wordpress 2.7 demo and today we have the last piece of his keynote. This last piece focuses on the future of Wordpress. Matt discusses a variety of topics including: upgrades, security, rich media, Wordpress as a hub, backpress and buddypress. Buddypress looks pretty strong - basically it allows you to easily insert a social network inside your blog. Many of the Wordcamp attendees asked questions about Buddypress and integration with other social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

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Earlier today we posted the “State of the Word” presentation by Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. After his presentation, Matt spent some time demonstrating the upcoming 2.7 release of Wordpress. I’ve embedded the video below. Wordpress 2.7 will be available in November.

Matt begins by explaining that eventually everything in Wordpress will have an associated API for extending the service. The new interface looks awesome. The posting functionality of Wordpress is one of the things I wish Drupal had. I find that Drupal can be extended further than Wordpress but the posting usability is WAY better in Wordpress than Drupal. The 2.7 admin interface appears to be even more usable than the current version.

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Today in NYC WordCamp was held at the Sun Microsystems HQ. A big thanks to Jonathan Dingman for organizing everything… having been to many "camps", this one was better organized than most. Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg provided the keynote address and I was able to capture all of it on video. I’ve split the videos into three parts: current state of Wordpress, a walkthrough of the upcoming 2.7 release and the future of Wordpress. Below is the first part and the others will be posted over the next 24 hours.

As for the state of Wordpress, on the self-hosted ".org" version, there are currently over 6 million active blogs. Matt discusses the top 10 Wordpress plugins, notes that the average blog has 5 plugins, the most installed is over 1,000. His goal is to make sure Wordpress is always small, fast and light.

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Over the years, WordPress has consistently proven to be the most popular blogging system out there. Millions upon millions of blogs run on WordPress, and that’s not counting those that are hosted on WordPress.com, Automattic’s free, hosted blogging service.

But it’s not just a blogging platform; as many have discovered, it works really well as a fully-fledged content management system — it really comes down to how the theme is written, and often the plugins that are used.

Let’s take a look at some of the oddest uses people have come up with for a mere blogging platform.

WordPress, the Social Network

BuddyPress turns your vanilla WordPress MU installation into a basic social network — complete with private messaging, friends, groups, personal blogs and status updates.

WordPress, the Email Newsletter Manager

Some have gone as far as using WordPress to manage email newsletters—forget using it for building a website! The process is outlined here, but in short, you create a newsletter category, use some theme coding trickery to hide the category on the site, create an RSS feed from it and set it up with FeedBurner. Magic!

WordPress, the Word Processor

Are you one of those people who are queasy about Google having access to all your information? Myself, I’m not so worried about that—but I hate the Google Docs interface with a great deal of passion (to each his own, eh?). So much so that if I’m out and about without access to a desktop word processor I’ll simply fire up WordPress and do some writing in there.

And if you’re collaborating, the new revision histories allow you to reverse any bone-headed changes your collaborator makes. Because you’d never do that, right?

WordPress, the Workplace Chat Room

Back in January, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) released the Prologue theme. Prologue is inspired by Twitter and allows users to post status updates with tags.

Some companies have since used Prologue to help employees stay up to date with each other’s projects, which is important in virtual organizations where these things don’t always circulate naturally. More recently, people have been using it to start workstreaming sites — sites built, in essence, to convince your boss you’re actually working!

WordPress, the Contact Manager

Don’t like Address Book or the half-baked Google Contacts application? Turn WordPress into your personal contact manager with WP Contact Manager, or even a company intranet address book. You’re best off doing this on a private server or with authentication, of course, or you might find yourself running from a horde of rioters.

WP Contact Manager does have some advantages over regular desktop software. You can tag your contacts and search via tags (instead of the bulky “Groups” feature most apps use), and comments have been repurposed as user notes that you and others can leave for future reference, which seems better than the generic Notes capability in most contact managers.

WordPress, the Wiki

Heard of Blicki? I thought not. Automattic started developing this plugin years ago and suddenly stopped. It worked at some point, but when I tested it with the latest version of WordPress it didn’t do much.

But still, it’s a cool idea. Most wiki distributions don’t have the ease of installation and customization that WordPress has, which I’m sure you’ll know if you’ve ever set MediaWiki up and subsequently configured it. Hopefully, Automattic—or someone else entirely—will take this project up again in the future.

WordPress, the Task Manager

This list is about weird and wacky, and this is probably the craziest idea in the list, thanks to some deep and dark crevice within the mind of Dustin Wax: use WordPress as your task manager.

You can email or phone in posts as tasks throughout the day, which are then delivered to your inbox via FeedBurner at the end of each day. Once they’re in your inbox, you can use whatever processing system you’ve adopted to complete that tasks or process them into a task list.

As the man himself said, it’s a crazy idea when there are apps like Ta-da List and Remember the Milk out there, but it seems crazy is what WordPress is all about!

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Wordpress 2.3 ReleasedWordpress Plugins Directory - Thanks, Wordpress!Douchebag Wordpress Plugin Helps You Curb Bad CommentsWordPress 2.5 Is Finally OutRevver Plug-in for WordpressWordpress 2.3 out on Monday; Now with TagsAutomattic Launches Wordpress Support Network

While the page feature in WordPress has been a mainstay of the blogging platform for years, it doesn’t get a whole lot of love from the programmers or plugin community. Here are 8 plugins that are compatible with at least WordPress 2.5 that will allow you to change their order, make sub-pages easier to navigate, add tags and more.

As always, don’t install all of these unless you want to decrease your blog’s response time.

My Page Order - A simple plugin that allows you to easily rearrange your pages into whatever order you’d like.

pageMash - Gives you AJAX control over the order of your pages and the ability to hide ones you don’t want to be seen.

Page Management Dropdown - Allows you to choose which page to edit from a drop down menu as well as gives you the option of starting a new page. Works well for WordPress installs being used as a CMS. Must be used in conjuction with an admin drop down plugin.

Page Restrict - You can select all, none or some of your pages to be viewable only by registered users. Great for sites being used as a CMS.

Page Template Extended - A simple plugin that allows you to build templates unique to any page by simply building it a PHP file named for its ID tag.

tags4page - tags4page allows you to finally add tags to your pages as well as your posts to make them appear in tag clouds and be friendlier to search engines.

Wordpress CSS Drop-down Menu - Allows you to create drop down menus out of your pages up to three categories deep. Can also tell WordPress in the admin section to hide pages.

Xavin’s List Subpages - Allows you to display either all of the subpages, or just the ones you choose, o