Professional-WordPress.com

We hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup. You’ll want to get in on this action.

Saturday, September 17 is Software Freedom Day . To that end, a few announcements about this weekend’s hackathon and WordCamp Portland

Last November , location startup SimpleGeo brought in former Digg CEO Jay Adelson to replace co-founder Matt Galligan as CEO. At the time, Galligan slid into the role of Chief Strategy Officer and became more of a public face for the company

In this video you can see the result of around 1 days work. I’ve been busy doing Dreams2Millions (D2M)’s brand new website design, youtube and twitter design

William Shatner, rejoice ! Earlier today, Wen-Ai Yu from the Google+ team announced with a post on Google+ and an accompanying YouTube video that the social network now boasts ‘verification badges’ for celebrities, public figures, but also people who have been added to an (undefined) ‘large’ number of Circles, with the promise to expand the verified profile system in the near future.

Blogging software WordPress is announcing a number of impressive growth stats today. WordPress is now powering 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%. And 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

The annual WordPress conference, WordCamp San Francisco , starts in fewer than 8 hours. The sold out event — three full days of programming for bloggers, developers, theme designers, and professional WordPress users — will be shared with more than 1,000 ticket holders from near and far. If you are one of the many people who wanted to come but couldn’t swing the time off or travel expenses, you should check out the livestream tickets that are for sale

This morning, we got tipped to check out wdyl.com . The tipster noted that it was apparently a new Google site attempting to “create a unified UI to search in multiple channels”. Sure enough, visiting the URL brought up a Google page — but it was a 404 page

Justin Kan is the founder of Justin.tv and Socialcam . You can follow him on Twitter here and read his blog here

Howdy! The second release candidate for WordPress 3.2 is now available. If you haven’t tested WordPress 3.2 yet, now is the time — please though, not on your live site unless you’re extra adventurous. We’ve handled a number of issues since RC1, including additional Twenty Eleven tweaks, a new theme support option for defaulting to randomized headers, and various RTL fixes.