Web Log: WordPress offering .blog domain

Automattic, firm behind WordPress, secretly snap up domain for about €20 million

Dear millennials, once upon a time there was a platform known as a blog. Before humankind could SnapChat, tweet, YouTube or Instagram its every waking thought, people often sat down in front of a physical keyboard and spent time carefully composing a rant of several hundred words, I mean post, on some topic or other. Now it's just something marketers do.

Maybe we'll see a personal blogging resurgence (no LiveJournal-esque emo poetry, please) now that Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired the .blog top-level domain (TLD).

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said, on his blog of course, that the acquisition cost about $20 million after the company secretly bid for the TLD using dummy company Knock Knock Whois There. No, really.

There’s a waiting list for sign-up if you want to get a .blog. Trademark holders can get theirs in August and the rest of us will have to wait until October.