It’s worth noting that this just applies to a very specific subset of sites for now, though. Bloggers will have to apply to be part of this program and own a custom domain for their blogs. WordPress will select sites based on “level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog.” What exactly the benchmarks for inclusion are, however, isn’t clear. Federated Media generally only works with larger sites written in English, but is clearly making some exceptions for WordPress.com.

WordPress.com’s announcement doesn’t mention any financial details, besides rightly noting that bloggers “deserve better than [Google's] AdSense.”

WordPress.com still explicitly prohibits the use of other advertising services on its site, though, including Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds, as well as sponsored posts through PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and Smorty.

The new Typekit integration brings about 50 new fonts to WordPress.com. Users will be able to use these to personalize the design of the site title, headings and body text. The tool offers relatively fine-grained settings for customizing these fonts, including the ability to set font weight and size.

The CSS editor has long been a popular WordPress.com premium feature. It’s now being rolled into the same $30/yr Custom Design upgrade as the new font editor.

We Were Promised Jetpacks

For a while now, WordPress has promised to use its JetPack extension to bring some of its premium features to self-hosted blogs as well. While Automattic has added quite a few new features to WordPress.com since the release of JetPack, though, it hasn’t introduced any of these as (paid) services for self-hosted WordPress installs yet.

Today, however, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg announced Jetpack, a new plugin for self-hosted WordPress blog that brings features like WordPress stats, Twitter widgets, support for shortcodes and , Automattic’s own Sharedaddy sharing buttons and wp.me shortlinks to self-hosted blogs with just one click.

Currently, all of Jetpack’s plugins are available for free, though Automattic notes that some future features “may require payment.”

WordPress has partnered with a number of popular hosting companies, including Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple and Network Solutions, to bring Jetpack to their one-click WordPress installs.

As of now, the choice of services included in Jetpack is not that exciting. Virtually all serious bloggers already use a third-party stats package and sharing buttons, for example. None of the current features really seem that exciting and worth installing Jetpack for if you already have a blog up and running. To get started, though, Jetpack looks like a great way to get access to these features quickly.

The new iPad theme gives users access to all the typical WordPress features (comments, search, menus, pages etc.) and allows more advanced users to easily customize their themes. The new version also allows the iPad users among your readers to create a web app that they can save on their home screens and use to launch your site in full-screen mode without the browser chrome.

Missing in the iPad design, though, is support for mobile ads. As BraveNewCode’s “design guru” Dale Mugford notes, “both AdSense and AdMob currently don’t work on the iPad,” but the company plans add support for custom ads in a forthcoming update.

As we noted earlier today, tablet sales are going to increase rapidly over the next few years, so getting your site ready for this is imperative.

Is Tech Blogging Itself is Ripe for Disruption?

TechCrunch’s big conference is called Disrupt and focuses on – well… – disruptive ideas and startups. While that blog’s new parents will likely not change much with regards to how the team there operates, it does somehow feel like this current batch of blogs is ready for a disruption itself. We like to talk a lot about how blogs are disrupting the newspaper industry, but I think it’s also worth thinking about what the next generation of tech blogs should looks like?

Looking at the current batch of top tech blogs (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, GigaOm, Engadget and the tech-focused blogs published by the NYTimes, Wired and other more mainstream publications), they all look and feel very similar. All of these are great publications in their own right, of course, but we really haven’t seen a lot of innovation in this business lately. Some, of course, focus more on social media, others on the financial side of the startup world and others on reviewing web and mobile apps. In terms of how they operate and publish, however, the differences are rather small.

What Should the Next Generation of Tech Blogs Look Like?

Obviously, I have some ideas about what I would do and will write about that soon, but I’d like to hear your ideas first.

If you were starting a new tech blog today, what would you do that’s different and disruptive?

Bonus question: Who are the tech bloggers that aren’t well-known yet but are doing something new and different on their sites?