Along with CNN’s The Political Ticker, this is one of CNN’s most popularly blogs, so it is great that we know host them both.

I’m also excited Anderson Cooper 360° Blog is joining us, because of Anderson Cooper.

Although, I don’t reguarly watch CNN or follow closely many of the issues that Anderson Cooper reports on, I’ve long appreciated his journalistic style and integrity. His presence both stands out from the dispassionate old school anchors and the news as entertainment or tragedy tourism reporters.

Describing his philosophy as an anchor, Cooper has said:

I think the notion of traditional anchor is fading away, the all-knowing, all-seeing person who speaks from on high. I don’t think the audiences really buy that anymore. As a viewer, I know I don’t buy it. I think you have to be yourself, and you have to be real and you have to admit what you don’t know, and talk about what you do know, and talk about what you don’t know as long as you say you don’t know it. I tend to relate more to people on television who are just themselves, for good or for bad, than I do to someone who I believe is putting on some sort of persona. The anchorman on The Simpsons is a reasonable facsimile of some anchors who have that problem.

Back to the blog. In the announcement yesterday, “The ‘new blog’ blog” David Reisner, 360° Digital Producer wrote “the 360Blog promises to be more interactive and more custom fitted to your daily blog needs. More pictures, more video”. He goes on to describe how “mouse over a link and you get a preview”, Snap Shots, contributes to this experience, and how categories can give you “a customized blog”.

Categories (and now tags too) being so easily their own view and having their own feed is one of the 1st WordPress experiences I was wowed by.

The comments so far on the new Anderson Cooper 360° Blog experience have been every positive, though people are disappointed it can’t make them coffee.

The previous version of this blog was on Google Blogger, and what I’m most interested in seeing is how participation improves. Though I wasn’t involved in “selling” WordPress for this migration away from Blogger, I regularly beg people that have blogs that I participate on to move off of Blogger because of how awkward it is to comment in that system. It is not a nice experience. It will be interesting to watch more people commenting more regularly on the new Anderson Cooper 360° Blog.

By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.

This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.

I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.

I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.

The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.

I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.

But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!

But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.