it wasn’t me. i promise.
September 6, 2006 
I think this is just the work of some mischievous spammer pretending to be from Automattic in order to send up the chaotic nature of their ad policy. It must be, because there’s sure as hell no ‘Lloyd’ on the list of staff and Podz doesn’t seem to have heard of him.
Unless they’re obviously a spammer (and it’s pretty damn easy to tell the difference between a book review blog and a splog), a genuine member of staff would give them the chance to remove the links before threatening suspension. Quite apart from this being the polite thing to do, you can’t rely on people to have read the ToS because it was only implemented after a couple of hundred thousand people had already signed up, and those people were never required to read it and agree to the conditions. And you can’t rely on them to know that Scoble is Special and they are not, and that although he has Amazon ads on his blog, doing the same thing on theirs will get them zapped. There’s no warning to this effect in Scoble’s sidebar, after all, and genuine members of staff would not assume psychic powers on the part of the recipient.
As I point out in the thread, spoofing email addresses happens all the time. Just because someone says they’re from Automattic doesn’t mean they are. If you get a similar weird or threatening email, send a feedback or contact support@wordpress.com so you can be sure you’re actually talking to someone kosher.
domain mapping and then some
September 5, 2006 
Now, either Matt’s commenters are not as techie as you’d assume Matt’s commenters to be, or they just don’t know much about wordpress.com because they’re all sufficiently techie to have their own domains and have not bothered with their accounts here since they made their test posts and retrieved their API keys; but you’d think at least one of them would be able to tell the difference between domain mapping and actual hosting. That’s not just a domain being pointed at a wordpress.com blog. That wouldn’t be worth posting about; they’ve been doing that for months, even before the testing was announced. That’s a custom theme, with ads and probably plugins, and while the backend may well be MU, there is nothing else about it that says wordpress.com. Apart for the little grey-on-grey credit at the bottom, which I’d kind of prefer wasn’t there right now. It implies anyone can get the same setup on wordpress.com, which of course they can’t. Yet.
I don’t know whether services like this will be assembled as an all-in-one hosting package or as a series of upgrades (domain mapping + custom theme + ads + plugins) but as I’ve said before, the a-la-carte approach is both more flexible from a user perspective and more lucrative from a business one, so I’ll be surprised if they don’t take that route. As for why you’d be shelling out for multiple upgrades rather than simply heading for a webhost? Well, you might be an A-lister who can’t afford your own bandwidth, or you might not want the hassle of upping sticks to another server and having to take care of your own upgrades, or you might simply want to stick with wordpress.com because you like them.
Pricings? Well, they’d have to charge considerably more for custom themes than custom CSS, because a) it’s worth more and b) nobody would bother with custom CSS if they could get an entire theme for a couple of extra dollars. Also, themes and plugins might well need to be installed by staff (security and that), and their time is valuable.
Yes, I’m speculating; but domain mapping alone could be demonstrated by linking to Donncha, or one of the testers. And Matt’s not unscrupulous enough to promise us things he has no intention of delivering.
