I observe that Matt is compensating for the loss of his beloved default blogroll by sneaking a link to his blog into the footer of wordpress.com:
Cute. He’s got couple of years at most before people cease to find his obsession with being #1 in Google endearing and start to think it sad (it is rather adolescent, after all), so he might as well optimise while the sun shines.
Also, they have done away with the stupid faux-blog design of the forums and made the fonts teeny-tiny to further discourage participation by anyone over the age of fourteen. Yay!
wordpress™ wank 
No said
I think the font size on the forums is bigger than the font size of this blog.
arvind said
In other news, the front page displays raw code and splogs
that girl again said
The post text is, yes, but tags, member titles, post times, links etc are so miniscule you didn’t even realise they were there 🙂
The state of the front page does not surprise me. I don’t think they’ve ever been known to test anything before pushing it live on wordpress.com, because we are the testbed.
Kissing Bandit said
Surely wp.com isn’t a single man effort and each and every person who helps keep wp.com up and running deserves to have their own name pimped in the footer of each page. Of course, maybe not everyone on staff is quite that egotistical.
-KB
sunburntkamel said
If you run a hosting service and blogging/CMS app, it helps to be able to point your own pwn4g3 of google. speaking of, how was this more noteworthy than wordpress winning a pwnie?
that girl again said
Are Automattic marketing themselves as SEO consultants now, then? And aren’t the rankings of wordpress.com, wordpress.org, and automattic.com (two nines and an eight) enough proof they know how to make Google dance to their tune?
As for the pwnies… everyone who seriously cares about security stopped using WP years ago, surely? We all know that their record in this area is less than stellar.
Byrne Reese said
To be honest, I don’t think this is too big a deal. His blog is a popular destination among WordPress users.
Although I think it would be advisable to at least include a rel=”nofollow” tag on the link. That would in one fell swoop address everyone’s concerns:
a) you make the link available to those who legitimately want it
b) you eliminate the impropriety of using your own commercial service for personal gain
Dr. Mike Wendell said
Which is why they had to remove the default blogroll and browsehappy links in the first place. Of course Matt didn’t see it that way. He just saw it that people were attacking him over an issue that shouldn’t have concerned anyone. Matt and Toni really need to learn some business ethics. (Along with copyright law as they appear to not understand that either.) I’m surprised that they didn’t drop the links into the default wp.com blogroll as well.
What’s even worse though is the title tag that’s included with the link. Something about “An example of a wordpress blog.” Of course that includes the broken layout in ie6, something he went to some length recently about supporting but yet the layout is broken on his blog when using that browser, the missing permalinks for comments, etc.
wpvstp said
WOW…I hadn’t even noticed that…the font was simply too small 🙂 On a side noter, the “features” page is now in such a disarray that it’s impossible to get a decent oversight, but maybe that’s intended. Oh, and under “premium features” there is a section on “unlimited users”, with a screen shot off how to add “Matt” as user to your weblog…
Dr. Mike Wendell said
I just found out that this may be because Matt is no longer the #1 Matt on the net.
Link
I wonder if he got dinged for that link or the link is there because of his fall from grace.
that girl again said
The latter, almost certainly. I don’t recall it being there before July, and his blog now ranks above wherethehellismatt.com (although the youtube results for his rival have prime position) so evidently it worked.
The title attribute about it being ‘an example of what WordPress can do’ is disingenous at best. It leads people to believe that they can recreate that set-up on wp.com, which they can’t, and it isn’t even a particularly stellar example of WP being stretched to its capacity. Why not just change it to ‘link to make me #1 Matt in Google’? If you’re too ashamed of what you’re doing to be upfront about it, and you have to hide it away in corners and make lame unconvincing excuses, then you probably need to rethink whether you should be doing it at all. Ditto ads. Ditto Spamgate. Ditto a lot of stuff, actually. If something would be unpopular if everyone knew about it, there’s usually a good reason. And if it wouldn’t be unpopular, why hide it?