One of the announcements that came out of the TechStars event today was that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, has acquired the hosted blog-comment service Intense Debate for an undisclosed amount. You can read WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s thoughts about it, as well as those of Automattic CEO Toni Schneider and Intense Debate co-founder Jon Fox, and you can also read some comments from Daniel Ha, the founder of Disqus, the hosted blog-comment service that is probably Intense Debate’s single biggest competitor in the comment-o-sphere.

In his blog post and in comments made to Mashable’s Adam Ostrow about the deal, Daniel is very diplomatic about the acquisition, saying it was a good move for Automattic and Intense Debate, and that “I think Disqus (and others in the space) will continue to work harder on offerings for users of WordPress and the many other platforms.” One of the main financial backers behind Disqus — Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures — took the same line in comments to me via Twitter. “Its great for the 3rd party comment system market,” he said. “It validates the category.”

All that said, however, there’s little doubt that this is going to put some pressure on Disqus. WordPress is undoubtedly going to integrate Intense Debate into its platform in a pretty major way, and will also push it to all of the millions of bloggers who use either WordPress.com or hosted WordPress (as I do). That’s going to have an effect on adoption rates, there’s no question. Fred said in his message that he hopes there is a level playing field: “I hope WP doesn’t play favorites,” he said. “Bloggers need choice.”

For my part, I remain a satisfied user of Disqus.

Maybe it’s the reverse of spring cleaning, but I’ve been feeling a yen for a new blog theme, and I finally took the plunge. I looked around at a bunch of different WordPress designs, and saw many that I liked, but in the end I went with the excellent Thesis theme from Chris Pearson. I was a big fan of his Cutline theme, and used that for some time before moving to my most recent theme — The Morning After. I tinkered with it and customized it quite a bit, and learned a lot about CSS along the way, but in the end I wasn’t really happy with it, and Thesis fit my needs perfectly. Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments, and if you’re reading this through your RSS reader then, well… never mind :-)

I’m still technically on vacation in Florida as I type this, but it’s raining outside and I can’t help but post something on the news that Automattic — the parent company of WordPress — has acquired Buddypress, as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg describes on his blog. It’s not so much that this is a huge deal, since it clearly isn’t. Buddypress was the one-man project of Andy Peatling, who took a version of WordPress MU (multi-user) and modified it to turn it into Chickspeak.com.

But nevertheless, I find it interesting because of what it says about where WordPress is going. Not only did the company just finish raising a boatload of cash, with the New York Times as an investor (which I wrote about here) but Matt has clearly gotten religion about the future of online media being social, and I think building on what Andy did with WordPress MU is his way of helping to make that happen.

If you take a look at Chickspeak, it looks very much like the kind of social network that Ning.com helps people build (I’m a member of a couple of Ning-powered social networks, including Social News Central and Wired Journalists), and Andy Peatling put it together by basically hacking a WordPress theme and plugging BBPress into it for user forums. And from Matt’s post, he appears to see that as a potential solution to the numerous social-network silos that are out there.

“Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.”

Actually, from the sounds of it, Matt doesn’t just want to take on Ning — he wants to go after Facebook as well, but with an open platform rather than another closed network (check the quote he gave Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch about “digital sharecropping” for other networks). More power to him, I say. It’s something others are also thinking about, including Chris “Factory Joe” Messina and his DiSo project.

A Twitter post (fittingly enough) caught my eye and sent me to a WordPress post in which newly-enriched founder Matt Mullenweg announced a Twitter-style group blog theme for WordPress called Prologue. Although I’m sure some will see this as Automattic going after Twitter, I see it more as a tribute to the power of the viral messaging app. In effect, the theme is an attempt to replicate the kind of group activity stream and messaging function that Twitter does so well in the form of a blog.

I could see this being hugely useful for a group working on a project, as Matt describes in his post, as a way of keeping track of what everyone is doing — complete with tags that users can follow and RSS feeds built in. It doesn’t benefit from the same kind of network effects as Twitter does, of course, because it’s restricted to a group of people who all use the same blog. But what if there was a way to tie those types of posts together with others from other Twitter-style blogs?

As Mark Hopkins notes in a post over at Mashable, this kind of thing is particularly interesting in light of what Dave Winer and some others have been saying about replicating Twitter in a more distributed fashion, to prevent the kind of outage it saw during Macworld. Now that I think about it, maybe Matt is thinking about going after Twitter :-)

As my friend Om Malik is reporting — and as founder Matt Mullenweg has confirmed on his blog — the company behind WordPress has landed $29-million in financing, including an investment from none other than the New York Times. This sounds like a great deal for an equally great company, one whose products I not only use for this and other blogs, but have recommended to dozens of friends and coworkers as the easiest way to get online, and many of them now use it.

As Om points out, WordPress is not only a blog platform — it has become one of the default publishing platforms for all kinds of online content, including some small newspapers. As CEO Toni Schneider notes, the hosted version of WordPress at WordPress.com has more than 2 million blogs and is now the number 12 site on the Internet in terms of traffic. And yet Matt Mullenweg, who I met when he came to the very first mesh conference in 2006, is as unassuming as can be — someone who just seems fascinated by what tools like WordPress can produce.

Matt and Toni say that the funds will go to build out the company’s server network and to add new features, including (I’m assuming) the recently announced upgrade of storage space on WordPress to 3 gigabytes. It seems clear to me that WordPress is well on its way to becoming something much more than just another blogging engine. Well done, Matt. TechCrunch reported last fall that Automattic turned down a $200-million acquisition offer, and now I can see why.