WordPress now powers 70 million sites, up from 35 million sites a year ago. Almost half of the biggest blogs in the world are hosted by WordPress.com or run on their own versions of the open-source WordPress platform.

Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider

The company is profitable, and expects to bring in $45 million in revenue this year, according to CEO Toni Schneider and founder Matt Mullenweg.

The majority of Automattic revenue comes from premium subscription services, and that’s supplemented by a “VIP” enterprise publisher business — in total, there are half a million paying customers — as well as a recently launched advertising revenue-sharing network.

(Disclosure: AllThingsD is an Automattic customer. I wrote this post using WordPress.)

Now Automattic, which has long been a distributed, flat company run by the two-man team of Schneider and Mullenweg, is bringing some outside executives into the ranks.

New CFO Stuart West, who was most recently an executive-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, had also been at Wikimedia, Kno, Tivo and InfoSpace.

West will be in charge of all things financial and operational. “When you see this much usage, you know there’s an extraordinary revenue opportunity,” he told me.

Meanwhile, Paul Sieminski, previously of Gunderson Dettmer, will become Automattic’s first general counsel.

Automattic is not your normal Silicon Valley Web start-up, between its commitment to and grounding in open source, its workforce distributed around the world (the company currently has no office, though it’s planning to open a new San Francisco headquarters soon), and its relative lack of interest in tech trends.

For instance, way after the rise of Tumblr and the rest of the social Web, WordPress.com last year added its first social features, to tie its blogs, bloggers and readers together into a network.

The company was slow to get social because it was more focused on expanding its blogging tools into a more general publishing platform, and also because of its general commitment to openness over walled gardens, Mullenweg said.

Meanwhile, Schneider said mobile usage has grown dramatically in the past year (is there any site or app for which that’s not true?), with a 500 percent increase in the number of mobile views and amount of content created from mobile devices.

What’s next for Automattic is tighter integration into social networks and a more seamless set of tools across different devices, the two said.

“We march a little to our own beat, and sometimes it’s out of sync with Silicon Valley — and that’s been to our advantage and disadvantage,” Schneider said. “We don’t get sucked into the latest thing, while some of our competitors are distracted by the latest shiny object. The disadvantage is sometimes we’re against the grain of what everyone else is excited about, and people ask ‘Why don’t you have x yet?’ — but we go at our own pace.”

One other way Automattic is unusual is its incredibly low rate of staff attrition. Mullenweg said that the company currently has 106 employees — and it has only ever hired 118 people.

Well, actually, I wrote the first draft on one. It turns out that there isn’t a WordPress plugin for my Remington Noiseless Portable.

Anyway, back to why I love my typewriter.

Sure, sometimes it makes an extra letter or skips a space, and there’s no good way to deal with mistakes. But there is something very satisfying about being able to literally put words to paper.

You have to think before you write. It’s cruel or ironic or something that we have reached a point where our words can travel across the globe and yet it has never required less effort to put them down. Maybe if it was a little harder, we would choose our words more carefully and assess their impact more fully.

Plus, since manual typewriters are officially now “a thing,” maybe I am cool.

Well, probably not. But, at the very least, I had a good excuse to pull Remington Sedaris Turpen Fried off the shelf. If only rotary-dial phones would make a comeback, I will totally be set.

ZDNet has a great piece up on how many other tech writers are also enthralled with their manual typewriters, with several offering their love letters. I decided to add mine to the mix.

Now, to add a bit of tech to the piece, there are some cool options to merge the old world with the new, including the USB Typewriter. Available either as a do-it-yourself kit or as an already-crafted device, the USB Keyboard is a fully functional keyboard made out of a manual typewriter.

The hackers and engineers of Y Combinator are doing what hackers and engineers do to any industry, they’re efficiently and ruthlessly disrupting the traditional model of venture capital and are going to destroy far more more wealth for their contemporaries than they create for themselves, as broadband did to entertainment, Craigslist did to newspapers, and Amazon did to traditional retailers.

– WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg

iStockphoto | oblachko

The plan is simple: Sites participating in the protest will go dark for the day or take some other action. Wikipedia, for example, will black out the English-language portions of its site for 24 hours. The move will likely shut out some 10 million users during the course of the day.

Politico pegs the estimated number of sites that will be affected in some way by the protest at 7,000.

Among the sites participating:

• Google will post a link on its home page to a document explaining its opposition to the bill.
• Mozilla.com, home of the popular Web browser Firefox, will go dark will do two things, see the update below.
• Reddit, the social news site owned by Advance Publications, will go dark.
• WordPress.org will go dark.
• TwitPic, the popular site where Twitter users share photographs, will go dark.
• MoveOn.org, the liberal-leaning political site, will go dark.
• The Cheezburger network, including sites like The Daily What and Fail Blog, will be dark.
• BoingBoing.net will be dark.
• Several gaming companies, including Minecraft.net, Riot Games, Epic Games, 38 Studios and Red 5 Studios, will be dark.

Update: Mozilla just sent a statement outlining what it will do for the protest: It will redirect traffic from the main Mozilla.org and Mozilla.com English websites to an action page for 12 hours on Wednesday, January 18th from 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern Time. It will also make the default Firefox start page black so that the tens of millions of Firefox users will see a black page with a call to action message rather than the traditional white page with the Firefox logo.

Since the list is in flux, Irish bookmakers saw a chance to get into the act by accepting bets concerning which sites will go down for the day and which ones won’t.

Wikileaks was the favorite at 5-to-1 odds that it would join the protest. Myspace, the once mighty social network, was running a close second at 7 to 1, while Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site, was at 8 to 1. Here’s a list of additional bets that Paddy Power was accepting:

14/1 YouTube
40/1 Amazon
50/1 Yahoo!
66/1 Facebook
66/1 TMZ
66/1 IMDb
80/1 LinkedIn
80/1 EMI
100/1 Twitter
100/1 eBay
100/1 AOL
100/1 iTunes
100/1 HBO
100/1 MSN
200/1 Sony
200/1 Universal Studios
200/1 Bing
200/1 Ask
250/1 BBC
250/1 Disney
500/1 Google
500/1 Fox

However, that’s a significant improvement from 2010. Tumblr had more downtime in two months in 2010 than in the first 11 months of 2011, Pingdom said. This year the longest Tumblr outage was three hours, compared to almost 24 hours last year.

To be fair, that unreliability probably stems from Tumblr’s quick growth. It now has 37 million blogs, up from 11 million a year ago.

Meanwhile, Pingdom’s measurements found that Blogger was by far the most reliable blog host. It had uptime of 99.998 percent in 2011, which Pingdom gushed was “highly impressive” and way better than might be expected for such a large Web site.

That strikes me as off, given that Blogger had an outage of more than 20 hours in May, which it attributed to data corruption. I’ve asked Pingdom for clarification.

Pingdom said TypePad and WordPress also had more than 99.9 percent uptime this year, while Posterous was just under that.

As noted earlier today, Atha, whose Twitter handle is @ReallyVirtual, live-tweeted descriptions of the raid in Abbottabad as it unfolded, not really sure what was going on, detailing helicopters hovering and explosions.

Naturally, every media organization in the world wanted to talk to him, not caring for time zone differences. He later tweeted that all he really wanted to do was take a nap.

And if that weren’t enough, his blog was hacked and started serving malware. He tweeted about that, too, but Web security firm Websense also noticed. Patrik Runald, a Websense security researcher, said that sometime overnight, the increase in attention on Atha’s Twitter feed, which contains a link to his blog, ReallyVirtual.com, was compromised and was as of this morning serving up malware. The malware was the old pop-up ad saying something to the effect that “your computer has problems, click here to download software to fix it, only $79.95,” and the software to “fix” the problem actually creates one. The malware has since been cleaned up.

“There was one line of code inserted into the page which loaded content from a site in Romania,” Runald said. Atha’s site runs WordPress, but an older version, he said. Rather than an attack carried out by anyone targeting Atha specifically, Runald thinks the attack was more likely carried out by an automated process that detected Atha’s blog after the surge in links to it via Twitter. “They wanted to get a free ride from all the traffic he was getting.”

Meanwhile, there’s also a scam-ad appearing on Facebook that advertises “Osama Bin Laden killed live on a news broadcast.” I could swear I’ve seen that one before. Either way, Websense says don’t click on it. Just don’t.

Details on the attack are sparse as yet. Mullenweg hasn’t disclosed which sites were affected. He said that Automattic’s team has been reviewing systems logs and plugging holes that may have been used to gain access. “We closed the avenues of access and have introduced several more layers of security to prevent a similar issue in the future,” he told me in an email.

“We presume our source code was exposed and copied. While much of our code is Open Source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited,” he wrote. The investigation is ongoing.

In the meantime, Mullenweg reminded his customers–and it bears repeating even if you’re not a customer–that passwords should be complicated and shouldn’t be used across multiple sites. He also suggests using tools like 1Password, LastPass, and KeePass to make it easy to keep track of different passwords.

Like many a geek–and after a decade away–I’m headed to South by Southwest later this week.

To get in the mood for the well-known multimedia festival in Austin, here’s one of the films making its debut this coming weekend.

It’s called “Attack the Block,” and is about a teen gang fighting an alien invasion. Plus, it has the best tag line ever: “Inner City Versus Outer Space.”

Which is just about how I am feeling about SXSW!

In any case, despite my lack of hipster cred, I will be there for a party hosted by WordPress with drinks by The Wall Street Journal Digital Network and All Things Digital on Friday, as well as to interview Flipboard Co-founder and CEO Mike McCue on Saturday in an afternoon session with the subtitle: “Game-Changer or Passing Fad?”

NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes and The Digital Solution’s Katherine Boehret will also be at SXSW, so expect plenty of coverage from Texas.

Until then, enjoy this movie trailer, y’all:

The company told VIP users the attack was “extremely large,” describing it as “multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.”

Automattic said it had fixed the slowness early this morning, but it apparently flared up again a few hours later, according to the WordPress.com Twitter timeline.

Automattic has said it receives DDOS attacks frequently, but is usually able to contain them from affecting users. (The chart pictured here is from a previous attack.)

At this point we don’t believe AllThingsDigital was affected by the attack.

The lightweight blogging company Posterous volunteered to open its books recently, coughing up every product stat NetworkEffect asked for during a recent visit to the company’s oversized San Francisco Mission District office situated below a yoga studio whose clientele is way more clompy-footed than I might have thought.

The Posterous team, led by CEO Sachin Agarwal, was pimping its new groups product, launched Dec. 15, that’s kind of like a nice-looking Web interface for an email product like Yahoo Groups, turning messages into blog posts and smoothing photos and other attachments into easily viewable form. Used mostly for private communication (like a neighborhood group or a small business team), the groups tool supports users who participate by email without opening a Posterous account.

First of all, Posterous Groups is still quite small: Posterous has 12.3 million total blogs, and only 134,000 of them are groups. About 3,000 groups are created per day, or about 20 percent of total daily sign-ups.

Overall, Posterous has 9.2 million monthly visitors on its own site and on custom domains, according to Quantcast, which measures the service directly with its permission. That’s up from 6 million in September, but still quite a bit less than competitors like Tumblr and WordPress, which have 59.6 million and 517 million people, respectively.

The new groups product sends a ton of email (with user permission, and with the help of SendGrid): 230,000 messages per day. Half of Posterous group distribution is over email rather than the Web, and 30 percent of users are not registered.

As I mentioned earlier, most groups–76 percent–are private. And a quarter are for corporate groups–an alternative to business collaboration tools like Yammer. Business groups have an average of 15 people, while family groups have about 10.

As for revenue numbers? Negligible. The company is only starting Google AdSense revenue sharing and talking about business accounts.

Posterous has raised about $5 million in funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital and Y Combinator.

I’ll be starting a two-year assignment with the Peace Corps in the near future. I would like to start a blog where I can record my daily activities for my friends and family to read. Do you have any suggestions?

A:

There are numerous free blogging services that offer templates, simple tools and a free address your friends and family can use to view your reports. Two that I have used and can suggest are Blogger, owned by Google, at blogger.com; and the independent WordPress, at wordpress.com.

Q:

In terms of battery life, does it make any practical difference if I leave my common programs on my MacBook Pro running when dormant versus shutting them down when I’m not using them and then firing them up as needed?

A:

I asked Apple about this, and the company said an open, but idle, application on a Mac notebook generally won’t use any or many processor resources, which means almost no impact on battery life, even if it performs periodic background actions like fetching mail.

Exceptions would be programs that do heavy-duty things in the background, like rendering videos. The company strongly advises making sure the laptop is in sleep mode when not in use, and keeping the screen at the lowest brightness level that works for you.

Also, you can check how much demand a program is placing on the processor by running the Activity Monitor, located in the Utilities folder in Applications.

Q:

Why would a GSM phone run in 3G-mode only on AT&T and not on T-Mobile?

A:

It’s true that both carriers use the same basic technology, called GSM. But, in some cases, phones (like the AT&T iPhone) are locked so that, unless you do serious hacking, you can use them on only one of the two networks.

In other cases, it might have to do with the frequencies used by a carrier. T-Mobile and AT&T use different frequencies for their 3G networks, and a phone might simply be built to support only the 3G frequencies used by one of the carriers and not the other.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns at the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.

Cheezburger was founded in 2007 by Ben Huh, who raised $2.25 million from angel investors at the time to buy the blog “I Can Has Cheezburger.” Huh has run the company as a lean, profitable operation since then, with 50 employees based in Seattle.

“This is a company that’s borne of no one’s expectations, and we’re totally fine with that,” Huh said in an interview Monday, admitting that, yes, “it’s a cat-picture Web site.”

Huh said Cheezburger had fended off multiple funding offers throughout the years, but finally decided to call back some VCs this fall. “If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it well,” he explained.

Today the ad-supported Cheezburger network of humor sites has 375 million page views and 110 million video views per month, with its 16.5 million visitors uploading 500,000 pictures and videos.

“We’re not here to flip,” said Huh, explaining that the company will use its $30 million to ensure it creates a long-term viable business. He said Cheezburger would open up 18 new job listings Tuesday alongside the funding announcement. Huh said his goal is to build “the Disney of the 21st century.”

Image via I Can Has Cheezburger user jasmine.