She's laughing at you, fandom. LAUGHING AT YOU.

"The inevitable next step is for Kim Kardashian to sit on the board of a tech start-up, host a global-poverty-awareness event and write a book on behavioral neuroscience." [New York Times]

The tax man's hanging round Apple's door, and now Tim Cook is due to appear before Congress on the matter. [Telegraph]

For her science fair project, this teenaged girl invented a supercapacitor that could maybe, with further development, charge your electronics lightening fast. Everyone's now feeling pretty bad about their baking soda volcano, huh? [Jezebel]

Matt Mullenweg says that talk of Yahoo buying Tumblr sent Wordpress imports from Tumblr skyrocketing, from 400-600 posts per hour to 72,000 on Sunday. Of course, that could've just been one really dedicated porn reblogger. [AllThingsD]

Tumblr users are having a collective meltdown to rival The China Syndrome (only onetime Yahoo users are old enough to get that joke). [Buzzfeed]

Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill once asked Sheryl Sandberg if she was a "pom-pom girl." If Mr. O'Neill were alive today, the Facebook COO would tell him she's "a pom-pom girl for feminism," she writes in her forthcoming book.  [WSJ]

Talk about chutzpah. An Indian website plagiarized articles on medical research, then filed a DCMA request with WordPress to pull the originals down. [ArsTech nica]

Hewlett-Packard is planning on "taking full advantage" of Dell's transition to a private company. [Deal Journal]

Somebody had to go and point out that zip, zero, not a single member of the billion-dollar startup club is based in New York. [Crain's New York Business]

Jon Stewart on Vine: "Every time there's a human advancement, it is used almost immediately for porn." [AllThingsD]

(Wikipedia)

New York City is pretty well saturated with incubators and accelerators and the like, such that when West coast stalwart 500 Startups decided to move into Silicon Alley, it opted to launch a coworking space, rather than further clutter an already crowded market.

Not that the plethora of local options is stopping everyone from piling into the accelerator game: According to a post on The New York Times website, the paper of record is launching a program called timeSpace:

a new initiative from The New York Times that brings entrepreneurs to our headquarters to refine and grow their businesses. Over four months, you and your team will work out of 620 8th Avenue, meet with relevant Times staff, demo your product and teach/learn alongside entrepreneurs and employees who make their livings in digital media, technology and journalism.

Well, why not? The existence of prior offerings from smaller, earlier competitors has rarely stopped The New York Times from piling into a story. What's good for editorial strategy is good for the tech portfolio, no?

But slow down.

Just because the Times has invested in digital media startups such as WordPress, Betaworks and Federated Media, doesn't mean it's seeking equity in timeSpace companies—which, per the announcement, will likely be early stage startups with a product already launched: "If and when you raise an institutional round of financing, The New York Times Company will separately consider participating if invited."

As for whether New York needs another accelerator, the Times appears to be hedging there as well.

"You may call it an accelerator or an incubator," the Grey Lady said in its carefully-worded call for applications. "Right now we are calling it an experiment and looking forward to working alongside you."

(Photo: Wordpress)

Wordpress.com, which hosts close to 58 million blogs across the world, announced last night that it will now accept payments for upgrades via Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer digital currency. The blog hosting platform says its mission is to "make publishing democratic," and because PayPal and other payment companies block access in a fair amount of countries, the company has decided to accept Bitcoin, enabling users without access to PayPal to still purchase Wordpress upgrades.

According to the blog post:

PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions. Some are blocked for political reasons, some because of higher fraud rates, and some for other financial reasons. Whatever the reason, we don’t think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya should have diminished access to the blogosphere because of payment issues they can’t control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them.

Wordpress has made paying with Bitcoins extremely easy, creating a Bitcoin section on the checkout screen that shows the price of your purchase in Bitcoins as well as an address to a wallet unique to that purchase.

By accepting Bitcoin, Wordpress is helping to legitimize the notion of open source digital transactions, a move that Reddit is also considering. Bitcoin has long been sequestered in a darker corner of the Internet, painted as the favorite currency for hackers and black market drug dealers. With more and more sites adding a Bitcoin payment option, along with the creation of the Bitcoin Foundation, the currency is making strides towards being accepted by the mainstream.

Writes Wordpress: "With Bitcoin we join a new digital economy that doesn’t leave anyone behind, essentially making financial transactions open source — something WordPress.com is behind 100%."

Gorgeous friends not, to our knowledge, included. (Image courtesy of Squarespace.)

Finally, officially out: Squarespace 6, a complete rework of the web design platform that's been around since the olden days of 2003. The beta has been trucking along since last October, but today the company finally flipped the switch. The new platform is the culmination of two years of work, following a $38.5 million investment made by Index Ventures and Accel Partners back in 2010.

Included in the overhaul is practically everything but the kitchen sink. A brief summary, from today's announcement:

The Squarespace 6 platform adds over 50 new features to Squarespace’s core service, including LayoutEngine, a transformative technology for building web pages. Other features include sophisticated media management, a new blogging engine, deep social network integration, Facebook page publishing, real-time statistics, a new commenting system, multiple author support, and more.

In a walkthrough of the new software for Betabeat, founder and CEO Anthony Casalena described Squarespace 6 as a “totally new product” and called the rebuild a “monumental undertaking.”

“The foundation that we created with 5, which lasted us basically the better part of a decade, that was good. But we needed something that would get us through the next 5 years,” he said. Asked what had taken them so long to launch since the beta, Mr. Casalena sounded affronted: “You can’t just in a couple weeks or months redo everything that was built up over seven or eight years and put it together haphazardly and throw it out there and launch it."

He does not strike us as one to be rushed.

Mr. Casalena described Squarespace 6 as designed to meet the needs of both developers and less code-savvy consumers: “We started creating this because we wanted to really be able to create any kind of site on the platform,” he said. “We’ve done a good job with blogs and portfolios here and also with small business websites, but we want to make sure that developers can use this to create great things,” he said.

The results are, in fact, pretty impressive. For one thing, the page builder is elegant and easy to use. Contrasting the new platform with others like Wordpress, with their "little wizzywig editors," Mr. Casalena showed off a new a grid-based editor, which allows you to drag elements around, only to see them always line up and resize properly. The results are also automatically responsive, meaning they'll work on mobile devices. Here's what that looks like, in practice:

“No one had ever solve the fundamental platform CMS question for websites. There’s all these little options out there,” but none of them quite nails it, he said. “This is our stab at saying, all right, this is what we think will really send things forward.”

But if the product impressed us, we're a little less certain about where Squarespace fits into the market. Despite its long history, the company has quite a bit of competition on the CMS front, with Wordpress sucking up most of the air in the room. Best estimates suggest Squarespace has users in the tens of thousands, while Wordpress has something like 54 million. Now, Squarespace is a paid product ($8 a month), which makes the metrics for success a little different. But that is a big gap.

Pressed on the issue, Mr. Casalena got a little fiesty: “If you really wanted to do a custom template on Wordpress, you have to go to Wordpress VIP, which puts ridiculous restrictions on what you can actually do.”

“Like, have you ever tried to place video?” When Betabeat admitted that yes, we had, and no, it hadn't necessarily always worked quite right, he added, “It’s kind of unbelievable. I actually don't understand how that sort of situation is going to be defensible for them, when there’s platforms like this, that give [users] total code control and also complete editorial control, without any of these problems.”

He proceeded to demonstrate the process of posting a video, which looked almost heartbreakingly easy.

The company's intention is to push for artists and others who'd respond to the portfolio offering, as well as bloggers and simple websites. "That's really what Squarespace version five targeted really well, so we're just starting with that as a baseline," he said. He also explained that, when they showed the demo to the CEO of Getty Images, who is one of their board members, he told them that his photographers pay $25,000 for equivalent sites.

And then there's Tumblr, which hosts 64.6 million blogs and has made inroads among the artistic crowd most likely to respond to the portfolio templates of which Squarespace seems so proud. But Mr. Casalena didn't sound too concerned.

"Well, Tumblr won't let you make a portfolio," he said, adding that "it's an integrated system where you've got not only project management, but pages and blogs all within one site, and you own the content, and it's a site you're paying for, so you have complete control over it."

"We consider Tumblr a channel," he added confidently.

What, you're too good for RSS?

There must be something in the water. First Facebook announced it would formalize its stalking function with a subscription feature. And today WordPress announced it will be adding a follow feature to give users another way to subscribe to a blog, in the hopes of driving traffic. It looks like Tumblr's "follow" button only further down the page--and ends up in your inbox.

"After weeks of experimentation with different designs, locations and names, we’ve determined the addition of a small, cute, little button at the bottom of your blog will dramatically help pageviews and retention," writes best-selling author Scott Berkun, who started working on WordPress for its parent company Automattic last year. The button shows up to "on all blogs, whenever someone who is not logged into WordPress.com visits."

There's no dashboard or newsfeed component, like following someone on Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook, but it does let users put their email address so they can be notified whenever your blog has a new post.

"We don’t change feature names to be fashionable or to emulate other services that might rhyme with 'critter' or 'shmacebook'," writes Mr. Berkun, but makes no mention of "shmumblr," a more direct platform competitor.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/)

ROLLING ALONG. "We are excited to announce there has been over 1,000,000 friendships made on Rolling.FM since our launch a little over a month ago!  Our platform has definitely become the music AND social discovery platform," writes cofounder Nhon Ma in an email. Rolling is launching more social features--like "buy a drink," whereby which users will be able to buy old and new friends "drinks," and the enhanced profile browser to "view others' playlist, photos, etc."

I LAUNCHED DIS. Meet Tinyproj, an experiment from the prolific Kyle Bragger. "Hello. Tinyproj connects talented developers, designers, illustrators, and copywriters with folks who need a hand with paid, short-term* projects."

IGNITE IT AGAIN. "Ignite NYC's on 10/10. We will be announcing speakers this week. We have a room of 1,600 to fill, the largest evaaarrr!"

THRILLIST IS SERIOUSLY HIRING. Seriously. Positions include Advertising Product Manager, VP of Business Development, Senior Buyer - Men's Accessories, Marketing Coordinator, Junior Recruiter, PHP Developer(s) and Director of Merchandising.

FOURSQUARE PUSHING PUSH API TODAY. Will they make it now that the heat is on? Stay tuned!

MOMS. CafeMom is now Mom.com, and hiring a PHP developer.

POSICORE PARTIES. Friday, New Work City with the Turntable.fms, three years, celebrate. "One year in our amazing new space. Three years of doing awesome things together. Hundreds of events hosted. Thousands of coworkers served. And we’re just getting started. Join us as we celebrate the past and chart the future. We’re changing the world, and we’re doing it together. Just like we always have. This event is a free event open to all."

And, a Wordpress party is an Automattic party. "Ranaan and Paul from WP.com VIP buying drinks for you in NYC." Tomorrow night. Midtown.

BEST OF THE EMAIL PRESS RELEASE FACTORY: "Call for Entries for the 16^thAnnual Webby Awards is now open! Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by the New York Times, The Webbys celebrates the year’s best websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile and apps. The early entry deadline for is October 28, 2011. Nominees will be announced in April 2012, and the hallmark Webby ceremony will be held in Spring 2012."

StartUp Health. "To date, more than 650 entrepreneurs, investors, corporations and organizations have joined the movement and taken The StartUp Health Pledge to support the ecosystem; more than 100 entrepreneurs have applied to participate in the StartUp Health Academy and already more than 50 startups have attended office hours receiving StartUp Health mentorship."

Manilla, "the free personal account management service, unveiled today its first edition of mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms, providing customers with another element of convenience to stay organized. Manilla has also added new accounts including Netflix and popular daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial to provide customers with the option to track entertainment subscriptions and time-sensitive coupons."

New York’s BuyWithMe "appointed Gerry McGoldrick to the position of CMO, only weeks after appointing new CPO Charlie Gray.  A former GSI (a division of eBay) SVP of Marketing, McGoldrick’s focus in the new position will be on marketing initiatives directed to further accelerate the growth of BuyWithMe’s customer base.  Additionally, McGoldrick plans on developing strategies to perfect BuyWithMe’s brand message to partnering merchants, as the only merchant-centric daily deal site.  McGoldrick’s appointment is yet more evidence of BuyWithMe’s continuing momentum in the daily deals industry."

AFTER GROUPON. "Harvard MBA friends Stuart Wall and John Buchanan launched Postabon in Dec. 2009 as a website to tell other New Yorkers where to find the best deals, sample sales and food & drink specials in NYC.  Once Groupon and its many clones had entered, they decided to shift gears and fulfill a need in the industry that was ignored. Enter Signpost."

Welp, Tumblr has caught up to Wordpress, Mark Coatney said during an NPR interview yesterday. Tumblr has been hot on Wordpress's trail for a while; now both free blogging platforms host or power about 20 million blogs. "Tumblr now has about the same amount of bloggers as Wordpress:  But which ones get more traffic? Guessing the latter," tweeted social media wunderkind Vadim Lavrusik, formerly of Mashable, now media liaison for Facebook.

We say, who cares? We're sick of hearing this comparison. Juxtaposing Tumblr and Wordpress is like comparing Apple to oranges.com.

O.K., bad joke. How about... Tumblr to Wordpress is like Reddit to The New York Observer. They are both places where you can consume content, but one is interactive and the other is passive.

Tumblr is not, at heart, a content management system. The social features--following, reblogging--are so integral to the experience that it's more appropriate to think of it as a social network. Wordpress and Blogger have failed so far to add a sticky social element to their platforms (beyond comments). While it's true that Tumblr makes a fine front-facing website--this blogger joined Tumblr just because it was prettier than Blogger--most users engage with content through their "dashboard," the stream of updates similar to Twitter or Facebook's News Feed.

At the same time, Wordpress has about infinity more functionality than Tumblr, between the options built in by default and the wealth of plug-ins that have been written by third-party and open source developers.

Tumblr isn't a blogging platform; it's a social network. Wordpress isn't social; it's a blogging platform.

Second reason we're sick of hearing Tumblr and Wordpress pitted against each other: Many people use both! Tumblr is more for personal blogging, while Wordpress is better for a more professional presentation. Even the Tumblr hater who is heading to China to start a Tumblr competitor has his professional sites powered by Wordpress and his personal bloggings powered by Tumblr.

Users of the more than 18 million WordPress blogs, for example, can now add a Textingly widget to their site which powers real time polling and news alerts via SMS.

A similar add on would let small businesses add live chat to their website so they can talk with customers in-real time, providing customer service or working to seal a sale.

Eventbrite, which just raised $50 million to build out its business and take on massive competitors like Ticketmaster, is going to integrate with Textingly to build SMS alerts and even text message tickets.

Perhaps most interestingly Textingly announced an integration with Twilio, which is the company powering dozens of the most widely used group messaging apps. Clearly Textingly won't expand the capabilities of services like GroupMe and Kik, but it might be a useful addition for other Twilio based services that are not focused on SMS.

It's arguable that Wordpress and Tumblr are really competitors, since Wordpress is a sophisticated content management system for publishers with an extensive library of probably thousands of plug-ins and themes to extend its functionality, while Tumblr is a minimalist rich media blogging platform of which the news feed and social features are a major attraction. Wordpress is primarily front-facing; the backend is a mess of wires and code. Tumblr is bi-directional--a Tumblr that lives on a .com makes for a pretty website that you may not be able to tell is part of a socially-driven application, but much of the activity happens inside the network's walls.