SAY is now built out of the unlikely combination of an ad network (VideoEgg), a blogging platform (Six Apart)–the two merged last year–and a social network for pets and their owners (Dogster).

What makes things even more odd is the company described the justification for the purchase as part of its “evolution to become the home of independent media as it continues to acquire and build media properties with a strong point of view, passionate editors, and active communities.”

Dogster was founded in 2004, raised $1 million in 2006, and described itself as profitable starting in 2008.

End of an era.

Another day, another giant venture funding.

Today it is $38.5 million to Squarespace–which lets you make blogs, Web sites, mobile apps, social networking widgets and other such oversharing digital tools–from Index Ventures and Accel Partners.

Squarespace is from New York. Index is in London. Accel is in Silicon Valley. It’s very global!

BoomTown will admit it–these big fundings are starting to bleed into each other.

And here I thought VCs were running out of scratch!

Nope.

Thus, the inevitable press release about the start-up, which competes with WordPress and Six Apart:

Index and Accel back Squarespace–Industry leading web publishing platform

NEW YORK, NY–July 14th, 2010–Squarespace, an industry leading web publishing platform, today announced that it closed a $38.5M minority growth investment led by Index Ventures and Accel Partners. This is the first outside capital that Squarespace has raised since its founding in 2003.

As part of this transaction, joining Squarespace’s newly formed board will be Dominique Vidal, of Index Ventures’ growth team, Andrew Braccia, from Accel’s investment team, and Jonathan Klein, Founder and CEO of Getty Images. Founder Anthony Casalena will remain the company’s largest shareholder.

Squarespace was founded by Anthony Casalena with the goal of redefining publishing on the Web. Today, Squarespace’s SaaS platform powers tens of thousands of websites worldwide. Businesses, bloggers, web developers and artists use Squarespace to quickly and easily create and maintain professional, high quality websites. Squarespace’s product is differentiated by its intense focus on design, integration and scalability. Notable customers include Marc Ecko, Porter Novelli, Bob Woodruff, Kevin Pollak, and Don Imus.

“Squarespace has created a powerful product used by web developers, bloggers, and consumers around the world to build beautiful, functional and flexible websites,” said Dom Vidal, partner, Index Ventures. “We believe in the team, the technology, and the market potential, and are excited to be a part of such a fast growing business.”

The size of the round will enable Squarespace to significantly expand operations as they seek to solve the problem of content management at its core, and allow its new partners to contribute to and participate in Squarespace’s continued success.

“Squarespace has been a profitable business since its first year of operation. This investment will not change that, but it will allow us to be much more aggressive in our quest to both create an incredible product and bring that product to market,” said Anthony Casalena, Squarespace’s founder.

With the Squarespace web publishing platform, you can:

• Quickly publish and manage a highly functional web site, including a blog and portfolio.
• Host on an expandable grid infrastructure that can manage sites of any size across the globe.
• Access hand designed templates and customizable photo galleries.
• Aggregate data from across various social networks completely within the Squarespace environment, without needing 3rd party scripts.
• Use the iPhone app to check your site, post to your blog, manage blog posts, and see site traffic, while on the go.
• Easily import images, posts, and links from existing blogging platforms.
• Track visitors and usage patterns of a site with powerful analytics tools.

“There are a lot of tools on the market that allow people to set up simple blogs for free. At Squarespace, we offer something different–a high quality, professional, reliable platform, designed from the ground up by us to work in a very streamlined way,” said Casalena. “The addition of Index, Accel and Jonathan Klein to the Squarespace team will help us achieve further growth and cement our position as a clear leader in this space.”

Squarespace packages are sold on www.squarespace.com and start at $8 per month.

First, CBS (CBS) digital dealmaker Quincy Smith and crew formally unveiled Code Advisors, the M&A shop they’ve been assembling for nearly a year. Now comes Michael Wolf, last seen in the halls of MTV Networks, where he was COO for a bit more than a year.

That was all the way back in 2007, but Wolf’s contract with Viacom (VIA) kept him more or less tied up until 2010. Now he’s opening up his own shop: Activate, a boutique media and tech consulting firm.

That’s a return to form for Wolf, who made his reputation as a tech-savvy media consultant at both Booz Allen and McKinsey (for a time capsule that’s also 100 percent up to date, see Kurt Andersen’s 1997 New Yorker profile of Wolf). He says he’s self-funding the operation, and won’t need to take on investors, as he already has paying clients (whom he won’t name).

He also has a co-worker: Anil Dash, the longtime veteran of blogging software pioneer Six Apart, who is now a director at Expert Labs. Dash says he’ll keep his job at the nonprofit, which is a sort of tech/good government mashup, and split his time between that and Wolf’s shop.

And yes, just because people still mix them up–Wolf is not Michael Wolff, the bomb-throwing media agitator/aggregator. That’s this guy.

This week, I had lunch with one of the nicest young Web entrepreneurs around the scene, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.

We use a custom WordPress.com installation for this site, which has worked out well for us, and the start-up also hosts AllThingsD.com. We also got a very nice hoodie.

In all seriousness, the company started as an open-source blogging software project at WordPress.org with Mullenweg as founding developer, while WordPress.com is for-profit and is run by Mullenweg and others at a start-up called Automattic.

Mullenweg came to San Francisco from his hometown of Houston to work on WordPress and other projects for CNET in 2004. He left a year later to work full-time on the development of WordPress.

It and others like it quickly rode the wave of an ever-growing trend of self-publishing, which has been increasingly embraced by both the single person writing about their cat to the large-scale media companies looking to develop more dynamic properties online.

WordPress and Automattic (which also runs Akismet, an anti-comment and trackback spam software service) has been the frequent target of takeover speculation.

But, while Automattic has reportedly considered those options, as well as hooking up with other companies like Sphere (which was just bought for $35 million in cash by AOL [TWX]), Mullenweg seems just as determined to build out his simple publishing platform, by adding ad networks and all sorts of bells and whistles to the offerings.

In fact, WordPress competitor Six Apart did just that last week with its acquisition of the New York-based ad, design and consulting services firm Apperceptive.

So I will bet Mullenweg probably has some news of his own, when he gives a short speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this morning.

We’ll see, but in this video, Mullenweg talks with BoomTown–after we admit to an obvious man crush on him–about the progress in the blog-publishing arena and where it is all going.

Here’s the video:

Financial terms weren’t disclosed, though Kommersant reports the deal to be worth some $30 million. The sale comes about a year after Six Apart and SUP allied to bring LiveJournal to Russia, where the platform quickly gained a lot of traction. Today www.livejournal.ru accounts for 28% of LiveJournal’s overall audience. As SUP CEO Andrew Paulson once said, “LiveJournal is the ‘blogosphere’ in Russia.”

The acquisition, then, would appear to make perfect sense. Six Apart unburdens itself of a tiring distraction and SUP gears up to transform LiveJournal into what its previous owners could not. “This is pretty cool because [SUP is] ridiculously excited about LiveJournal, and [has] been for a while,” writes LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick. “They want to throw a lot of resources at LiveJournal in terms of product development and engineers. ‘LiveJournal.com, Inc.’ now stands alone again, focusing on nothing but LJ. “

Bebo and Six Apart are nice additions, but it’s MySpace that will bring quite a bit more heft to this effort–an addressable market of some 70 million active monthly users, at last report.

Who’ll next join OpenSocial? Will it be Facebook? CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s likely puzzling that question out at this very moment as he waits for an invitation to join–which apparently hasn’t yet been extended. “Despite reports, Facebook has still not been briefed on OpenSocial,” the company said in a statement. “When we have had a chance to understand the technology, Facebook will evaluate participation relative to the benefits to its 50 million users and 100,000 platform developers.”