You spend a lot of time creating great content and attracting an audience for your blog. What if you could use that influence to make a positive social impact? Now you can.

We’ve teamed up with SocialVibe, and now by adding the SocialVibe widget to your blog, you are able to earn donations for the charity of your choice by getting sponsored by a brand that appeals to you.

Each time someone visits your blog and engages with your brand (by rating a video, for example), you’re making a difference. That impact is immediately visible on your badge, i..e., ‘My blog has provided 63 cups of clean water for people in need.’

The money donated comes from your brand, so you and your readers never have to pay a dime.
In addition to earning donations, you’ll also get feedback from your charity about the difference they’re making thanks to you. By clicking the charity logo in the badge, you can find information about your cause and view real-time goal progress.

Setup is easy and only takes a few clicks – just go to Appearance->Widgets in your dashboard, add the SocialVibe widget and pick a cause and a charity. For more details you can find documentation in our support area. If you change your mind about your sponsor or cause, you can easily make adjustments by visiting your widget dashboard.

If you are running a self-hosted WordPress blog, be sure to grab the SocialVibe plugin.

With SocialVibe, our community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world.

Sorry for this being the latest wrap-up ever.

May was a fun month for us. We rolled out a ton of new features: the ability to add YouTube videos and polls to comments, stats in your time zone, the VideoPress upgrade (with HD!), post by email, new stats charts, comment search, improved comment reply by email, and VideoPress.com.

May was also the month for our largest-ever WordCamp San Francisco. Mission Bay Conference Center was a packed house, but (amazingly) everything ran on schedule, and nothing went wrong! A round of applause is due to our sponsors, speakers, and everyone who attended for helping to make WordCamp such a smooth success. Thanks for making it all possible.

For post-event coverage of WordCamp, check out the updated site for WordCamp San Francisco 2009.

And now, the stats for May:

• 387,416 blogs were created.
• 411,704 new users joined.
• 5,504,742 file uploads.
• 3,333 gigabytes of new files.
• 826 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 8,625,931 comments.
• 6,914,546 logins.
• 1,243,177,638 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,207,143,849 on self-hosted blogs (2,450,321,487 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 2,105,723 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,728,890,160 words.

Plus:

There were 12,123 post-by-email posts since the release of that feature on May 12.

Video uploads are on the rise after the release of the VideoPress upgrade: 5,587.

WordCamps in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Milan, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp San Francisco.

WordCamp San Francisco had 739 pre-event registrations (a huge jump from 427 last year), and 789 actual attendees from 32 countries — plus 15 speakers, six sponsors, and lots of volunteers.

WordCamps in June: WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Brazil, WordCamp Dallas.

Health.com has launched the Ask the Natural Living Experts forum hosted on the new TalkPress VIP service.

We’ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and we’ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com

Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. We’re working on making it .com/.org universal.)

Thanks to Yahoo! for their help with their Yahoo! Application Platform, and thanks to all of you for the best blogs on the intertubes.

If you need help with either of these new toys (or anything else), please contact our support team.