I'm not confused, but I daresay that there are a handful of folks out there who are. Let me try to clear a few things up. There a couple of projects that you need to know about.
The first is WordPress. WordPress is software. Besides being the bane of my day-to-day, occupying much of my free development time and actually earning me freelance money, WordPress is the software that runs on this site to present this blog to you. (I'm being careful about avoiding this whole "Powered by" phrasing, which may become the topic of another post.)
You can download a copy of the WordPress software for free, and upon uploading it to a web host that supports WordPress' basic requirements, you can have a weblog up and running within minutes.
Another project is WordPress MU, from now on in this post called "WPMU" for disambiguity. WPMU is the Multi-User version of WordPress. It's a bit of a misnomer, though. WordPress itself supports more than one user. What WPMU does that WordPress doesn't is allow a central installation to control multiple distinct sites of WordPress. Kind of like Skippy's plugin. It should really be called WordPress Multi-Site.
WPMU is also released under a GPL license, which means (among other things) you can download an install it just like you can WordPress. After all, WPMU refactors the core WordPress code every so often so that it keeps up with all of the core version's features. But WPMU is being used for another WordPress project that is causing some confusion - WordPress.com.Something relatively new in the blogging world is WordPress.com. WordPress.com is actually a service, not software. The service allows people to quickly create a blog using the WordPress software. WordPress.com is run by the people who host WordPress.org, the official WordPress site. The software that WordPress.com runs is a version of WPMU that uses the alpha features from WordPress itself.
The crossover has caused some interesting issues. For example, where is WordPress.com support? Well, each administration page within a WordPress.com site has a link for providing feedback. I'm not sure where that feedback goes, who reads it, or how the person who reads it responds to it. And since WordPress.com runs on a variant of an alpha of the core WordPress code, it's likely to generate a few issues.
Moreover, the support team for WordPress has tried to avoid supporting the alpha version of WordPress, since none of its features have been nailed down. That works fine when there aren't any support requests from the WordPress.com folks on their WordPress.org forums. But there doesn't seem to be anywhere to submit support requests for WordPress.com. I didn't see any forums for WordPress.com anywhere.
WordPress.com isn't a pay site. So far, I haven't seen anything to indicate that you'll need to pay for WordPress.com hosting your blog. That's not to say that couldn't change.
But the question of using WordPress.com for me is a simple one. I already have a host - in fact, a whole dedicated server - for which I pay to host my sites. My blog is one of these sites. Via this server I have all of the benefits and pitfalls that one has when hosting their own site. I can install any software I want and run any services I want, but I also have to install them myself and troubleshoot any problems that they cause. I can see the allure of something like WordPress.com from this maintenence standpoint, but there are other issues.
For one, WordPress.com themes are somewhat limited. You can only pick from a handful of themes that were pre-selected for their ability to run within WordPress.com's safe environment. Untested code is not allowed to run on WordPress.com. So your chances of running any special plugins are nil, and even if you could install a plugin (you can't), you wouldn't be able to edit your theme to make use of it. I'm not sure what the developers of WordPress.com have in mind for allowing the modification of themes, but I hope it's not like some of the recent commits, which may suggest that this type of functionality is available for every theme, when it's not.
WordPress.com also offers a limit amount of storage. The free disk space currently reported on my WordPress.com account (completely unused) is 26MB. I used to go through the trouble of resizing all of my photos so that they wouldn't take up all of my space, but now I don't bother. With the space allotted in my WordPress.com account, a single outing with the kids (1 post) would suck most of my space. And then when I get it all on there, there is no export feature to let me take my blog elsewhere, even to a self-hosted WordPress site.
So why would someone jump to using WordPress.com when they've already got a blog running? I can see the case for users who want to start out fresh and have no experience, or maybe for people who are tired of paying hosting fees and are willing to give up those extra features to avoid paying for hosting. But I can't see a practical reason to jump to shared free hosting when you've got an established site.
Many of the folks on WordPress.com now are people who were invited to join WordPress.com, which is the only way to get an account. Since most of the early-adopters were excited developer-types who also didn't know what to post on their WordPress.com blog that would be different from their regular blog, there are a lot of meta-WordPress posts. That is starting to mellow now that the invites are spreading to "normal" people, but it's interesting that when presented with the cool new gadget, the techies find a way to make it work just to have it as a badge of technorati.
Another weird way people have been using WordPress.com is to get a preview of the features of WordPress 1.6. This seems ill-advised. While the WPMU code derives from the core WordPress code, there is no guarantee that anything from MU would be back-ported to WordPress itself, especially not the multi-"user" features. There have been many code changes in WordPress itself to facilitate the WPMU functionality, specifically the changes in the way the user metadata and options are stored in the database. But the best way to test WordPress 1.6 functionality will be to, well, install a WordPress 1.6 alpha.
This all leaves me answering the question - Why am I on WordPress dot com? Yes, I have an account. Actually, I was offered more than one invite to join, and did not do so until just recently. Initially, I thought the reason I joined was so that I could invite other people. This really doesn't do much for my blog installation/customization freelancing, since I couldn't charge anyone to install a WordPress.com site, nor could I customize it when it got online. Moreover, I only have one invitation to give out, and I assume that eventually the system will open up and invitations will be worthless.
I guess that I would use my WordPress.com site as a badge of technical connectedness. But considering that I host everything here at Asymptomatic, and this is how people know who I am, I would rather have them associate me to here than the WordPress.com site.
I think that it's just peer pressure. "Why don't you have an account yet, Owen?" "I don't know, what would I use it for?" "I don't know but you should have one." "Uh, ok."
So, if you had any ideas, I'm listening.
