We’ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and we’ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com

Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. We’re working on making it .com/.org universal.)

Thanks to Yahoo! for their help with their Yahoo! Application Platform, and thanks to all of you for the best blogs on the intertubes.

If you need help with either of these new toys (or anything else), please contact our support team.

The tasty new logo

We’ve been busy lately here at WordPress.com — we’ve had an announcement of a new or updated feature for you every day this week. Today, you’re getting a two-fer!

Earlier this week, we announced VideoPress, the great new video feature for WordPress.com. Now VideoPress has its own home on the web at VideoPress.com. We’ve also got a great video introduction created by our company auteur Michael Pick, so be sure to head over and check it out. We’ll be continuing to add features to VideoPress, including support for WordPress.org users, so stay tuned to VideoPress for all the latest.

P.S. If you’re a design geek like me, you might be interested to know that the VideoPress logo (as well as all of VideoPress.com) is set in the beautiful Museo family of typefaces, designed by your fellow WordPress.com bloggers at the exljbris Font Foundry (exljbris.wordpress.com).

Since opening up the comment reply via email feature to everyone last month we’ve been continuing to improve it. Here are some of changes that have gone in during the last few weeks:

• Better detection of email auto responders / vacation messages
• Added a reminder to the bottom of comment notification emails about the reply via email feature
• Vastly improved support for non-English character sets
• Fixed a problem that some iPhone users were seeing
• Improved email address parsing for Blackberry users
• Fixed cases where signature blocks weren’t being properly removed
• Better paragraph formatting when parsing comments

And many little tweaks to deal with the oddities of various email clients. You’d be amazed how many email clients have their own little quirky ways of doing things.

For users who don’t include quoted reply text in your emails I do want to point out that you’ll need to end your email comment reply with !END on a line by itself. We’ll detect this in place of quoted reply text and use everything above the !END line as the new comment. This is mentioned on the comment reply via email support page but I wanted to bring specific attention to this to avoid any confusion.

We want to make comment reply via email 100% for every user, so if you have any problems with it at all please contact support. Or, if you just want to hi, that’s okay too

You guys are generating an amazing amount of feedback on your blogs. Matt mentioned in the April Wrap-Up that there were 8.6 million comments! Comments are flying in every second of the day.

And have you ever had one of those blog posts that was good, but the real action was in the comments? The blog post is only half the story, it’s the feedback from everyone else that fills in the rest. To make it easier to find the second half of these stories we’ve added comment search to WordPress.com search.

Select the comments options from the WordPress.com search page and we’ll hunt through the millions of comments that have been added to WordPress.com blogs to find what you are looking for. To reduce the comment inferiority complex you get many of the same features and options as post search: sorting by relevance (the default) or most recent, limit results by blog (like site:gigamom.com) and an easy way to subscribe to new matches via an RSS feed ( the Follow this search via RSS link at the bottom of the sidebar).

Comment search, because it was about time comments got a bit more respect.

If you’ve looked at your WordPress.com blog stats today, you might have noticed the charts look a little different. We’ve replaced the old proprietary chart object with Open Flash Chart, an open source alternative.  Charts now look like this:

(Though I can’t guarantee you’ll see numbers like that).

All the old charts are still available in more or less the same form.  And we’re hoping to explore some of the new possibilities Open Flash Chart has to offer – so keep an eye on your stats.  Like we had to ask.

And in case you missed it: yes, blog stats now work in your time zone.

Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at work…? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email we’re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.

Maybe you’re on holiday and want to show your journey. Maybe you’ve captured something with your cell phone that you just have to share. Maybe you’re at work and should be doing something else. With Post by Email you can keep everyone up-to-date without even opening a browser.

Post by Email is super simple to use. From the new My Blogs menu you can generate special email addresses:

You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.

Now for the fun part – send an email!

You can send email from any email client, whether in a browser, on your desktop, or from your cell phone, and as much formatting will be retained as possible.

Attachments are not left out, and your images will be included and automatically converted into thumbnails.  If you include multiple images they’ll be converted into an attractive gallery.  Now you can take photos anywhere and have them appear on your blog in moments.

If you’ve purchased the Space Upgrade then MP3 attachments will be displayed using our audio player. If you’ve purchased the VideoPress upgrade then you can also include videos.

There really is no easier way to get media onto your blog.

If this hasn’t whetted your appetite, here’s a quick run-down of Post by Email features:

• Transcoding of any video files supported by the WordPress video player (mp4, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, and m4v).
• Automatic removal of standard signature blocks, with support for manual removal of other signatures.
• Add your email addresses directly into your address book using downloadable vCards. (You don’t even need to remember the address!)
• Automatic notification of a published email post.
• Conversion of YouTube URLs into embedded videos.

For advanced users wanting that little bit extra, full control of your post is possible through special shortcodes, with details provided on the Post by Email support page.

It’s time to start emailing again!

You may have noticed that videos around here have been getting higher and higher quality.

I don’t just mean the cool content from WordPress.tv, but the video player and video/audio quality itself.

We’ve rewritten how videos work here on WordPress.com from the ground-up and taken inspiration from the great products at Vimeo and Smugmug, and are pleased to formally offer our video upgrade to everyone. Here’s a sample of what it can do especially for those sweltering in the heat right now:

With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.

Videos can be streamed and embedded here on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.

The video feature was part of the space upgrade previously and for those that helped us test it we have now extended a one-year free video upgrade. We just want to make sure existing video users can continue to use it without any hassle. For new users, the video upgrade costs about 5 bucks a month.

As an added bonus, each video has stats attached to it so you can see how often they’re being viewed, and more stats are coming.

If you’d like to geek out, here’s some technical information about the encoding of videos and such, and the entire VideoPress WordPress video player and transcoder is under the GPL and open to the world.

In the future we’ll be working on giving your viewers more options for streaming and downloading videos, better and more in-depth stats, more player customization, and a way for WordPress.org users to use and embed the new player easier.

In April we introduced Instant Findability, TED video embeds, a springtime theme, a cool new domain, and reply-by-email for comments, now open to all. A pretty busy month, with more awesome features on the way, plus WordCamp San Francisco, on May 30.

If you’re in town or want a reason to be, be sure to register soon. We’ve got a great speaker line-up, free WordPress schwag to give away, and, of course, a BBQ lunch.

Here are the stats for April:

• 370,053 blogs were created.
• 401,320 new users joined.
• 5,206,156 file uploads.
• 3,050 gigabytes of new files.
• 775 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 8,691,962 comments.
• 6,991,335 logins.
• 1,162,296,607 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,130,311,791 on self-hosted blogs (2,292,608,398 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 1,904,262 active blogs and 19,665,407 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,569,961,240 words.

Other cool stuff:

After tallying the community vote, the judges panel (Derek Powazek, Matt Thomas, and myself) selected two winning designs for the I <3 Blogging design contest. You can now buy “Dandy(lion) Blogging” by el_square and “I Love Blogging (and Pixel Art)” by Robert Podgórski in the Infectious store as vinyl stickers for your laptop, iPod or iPhone. Congrats to the winners and all who submitted their work.

Though we released comment reply via email late in the month (April 23), you’re already making great use of it. 1,029 replies to comments via email just in the final week.

Video uploads using the WordPress player are on the rise, too: 5,290 in April. If you haven’t already checked it out, head to WordPress.tv to see what your videos could look like in the WordPress player (and to learn a bit, too). If you like what you see, you can purchase the Space Upgrade to get uploading.

We launched BuddyPress 1.0, a collection of plugins that transform a vanilla WordPress MU install into a social network.

WIRED.com migrated its blogs to WordPress, and Intruders.tv relaunched their channels using WordPress MU.

WordCamp Central was redesigned, and now has an awesome map that displays WordCamps around the world.

There were six WordCamps in April: WordCamp China, WordCamp Hong Kong, WordCamp NOLA, WordCamp Tokyo, WordCamp Nigeria, and WordCamp Reno-Tahoe.

Coming up in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp Milan, and WordCamp San Francisco.

When we sat down at an Austin cafe in 2005 and wrote the stats system, Matt and I had no idea what we were getting into. He created the databases and drew the little smiley face while I wrote the code. We had milk and cookies. It was really cute. We were naïve!

I swear it was Matt’s idea to store stats data as daily summaries in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is why stats days have always ended at odd hours for non-Greenwichians. But even if I seem blameless, I failed to champion your cause soon enough. It is even more my fault than Matt’s.

And so today I present a gift. If you have set your blog’s time zone, your stats reports will honor that setting (in whole hours from -12 to +14). This upgrade is retroactive to the beginning of 2009. It affects all blogs using WordPress.com stats, even self-hosted blogs using the Stats plugin (version 1.4).

The best part is that any time you change your blog’s time zone, the stats reports change retroactively. This works because now we store data by the hour instead of by the day. I’ve written lots of new code and Barry is bringing many new systems online to cope with the additional data, and we do it all just to give you stats in your time zone. We really do like you.

Some of you may have noticed we’ve been experimenting with a new feature in comments here on WordPress.com, namely that you can now embed YouTube videos and PollDaddy polls directly in a comment.

Although shortcodes are great and we’ll continue to support and encourage them for comments the simplest possible interface seemed to be just a URL.

The URL is all you’ll need to include a YouTube video or PollDaddy poll. To try it out copy and paste the permalink for a video or a poll on PollDaddy Answers and put it on its own line in a comment, like enter enter http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1598108/ enter enter. You’ll now have a poll embedded in the comment just like this:

View Poll

(By the way, I have a Kindle 2 and it’s the bestest thing since sliced beer.)

Of course if someone leaves a video or poll you don’t like it’s just like them leaving something else you don’t like, you can always delete it or edit it to remove the offending link.

As you and your audience start to play with this it should spice up comments a bit, and based on your feedback we may expand this to encompass other shortcodes and embeds in the future.

Keep commentin’.