If you’re an iPhone user — and I expect there will be a few more of you on July 11th — these latest updates are for you.

First we’ve updated our mobile interface, which you can reach at m.wordpress.com, to be much more iPhone friendly. It’s still not sexy, but it’s quite snappy and is great for checking your stats, posting an entry, or posting a bookmark on the go.

Second we’ve updated the Prologue theme to be much friendlier to iPhones both for browsing and posting. We now have about half a dozen Prologues that we use internally at Automattic to coordinate our development, support, and even communication with contractors, so I’ve been testing this out pretty heavily over the last few days and it’s quite handy.

I think the iPhone is a pretty exciting new platform, and I think we’ll do more to embrace it in the future. Having such a powerful browser available on the phone really opens up what you can do. I recently picked up a N95 because I’ve heard people compare it favorably to the iPhone, but the web experience is terrible! Once you get used to that touchscreen, it’s hard to go back.

Here are two snapshots of the features in action:

Some may have noticed the “Turbo” link in the upper right corner of the admin area. (Remember when computers used to have a Turbo button?) Behind it is a new feature of WordPress.com, support for Gears.

Gears? It is a browser extension like Flash or QuickTime/Media Player. However Gears works with the browser to enhance web based applications. It can create local database and file storage, and run JavaScript in the background to update them without slowing down the browser.

Gears has been in the making for over a year and is well known among the web developers. Currently it supports Firefox versions 2 & 3 and Internet Explorer versions 6 & 7. Safari 3 support is coming soon.

On WordPress.com it is used to store all images and other web page components from the admin area to the user’s PC, speeding up access and reducing unnecessary web traffic.

The speed increase is most noticeable when Internet is slow or on high latency and makes everybody’s blogging experience more enjoyable.

To enable this new feature, click on the “Turbo” link and follow it to Gears’ site to install it in your browser (if not already installed). Then the browser will have to be restarted and after logging back in WordPress, click the “Turbo” link again to give permission to Gears to work on WordPress.com.

After that Gears will download around 200 files and store them on your PC. It will also update them when needed automatically in the background, no other actions are required.

The downloaded files will be used everywhere in the admin interface, speeding up every page load, enabling you to blog at faster than the speed of light.*

* Your mileage may vary.

Guest post by Andrew Ozz.

More info in the FAQ: Boost your dashboard - Turbo style.

It is hard for search engines to grasp the tens of millions posts at WordPress.com, so we’re giving them a hand.

I’ve always wished to start the week with a new SEO feature. That’s why we have an early Monday surprise for you — XML Sitemaps for all WordPress.com blogs.

From the Sitemaps.org website:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.

Translated that means that search engines have a better idea of your content and might start to send more traffic to you.

The funny thing is that you don’t have to inform anybody, because we will do it automatically for you. A sitemap file is available to every search engine that supports the protocol including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, and others.

Now, feel free to write a new post to deserve the increased attention by the search engines.

We are happy you liked our new admin bar design, but we are even happier to make it better.

Here are two little improvements, based on your feedback:

The admin bar is visible in your admin panel, too.

The admin bar used to show only on blog pages. Not any more.

There is a link to your Stats page in the admin bar.

The link in My Account takes you to to the Stats page on your Global Dashboard, where you have access to the pageviews and other stats of all your blogs.

It’s little things that make us smile.

Another day turns into another month and brings us another wrap-up post. I’m currently in a remote undisclosed location but nothing could stop me from blogging to you. It’s not all bad — here’s my desk at the moment:

What more could you need?

Here’s the action from last month:

• 221,343 blogs were created.
• 245,156 new users joined.
• 2,638,958 file uploads
• About 1,074 gigabytes of new files.
• 417 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 3,415,871 posts and 1,120,407 new pages.
• 5,862,782 comments.
• 4,865,114 logins.
• 693,555,035 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 441,241,199 on self-hosted blogs. (1,134,796,234 pageviews total across WordPress blogs we track.)
• 71,351,276 pageviews in RSS feeds.
• 965,041 active blogs, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 156,693,165 unique people visited WordPress.com-hosted blogs.

We introduced some cool stuff in May including the Monotone theme, Identicons, a new admin bar, and threw a bitchin’ party to celebrate WordPress’ fifth. What’s in store for June? I don’t know, but it’ll be hawt.

For those of you in San Francisco or the Bay Area, you should join us this Tuesday, May 27, for a birthday party to celebrate the 5th year since the first release of WordPress.org, the software that powers this site.

You can see the official announcement on WordPress.org and RSVP on Upcoming or Facebook.

Or rather, usability testing in New York. If you’re reading this you’re probably a WordPress user. If you also happen to be in New York City and have some free time you may be able to influence development and get some free WP stuff at the same time.

We’ll be testing the WordPress interface over the next few weeks in New York City, and are looking for some volunteers to help us with this research. We’re looking for a range of WP users, from novice bloggers to experienced multi-site creators.

The first round of test sessions will take place later this week, Wednesday through Friday, with a follow-up round the next week on Thursday and Friday. If you are in New York and are available at these times to be at the testing facility in Union Square, you may be eligible to participate.

If so you’ll receive a $75 WordPress gift certificate, which can be redeemed for WP upgrades and/or merchandise in appreciation for your time. If you’re interested in participating, [link removed, we got everybody we need. Thanks!]. If you are lucky and get a golden ticket, someone will contact you within 24 hours to schedule a session.

Today we launched a redesigned admin bar, the handy toolbar you see at the top of every WordPress.com blog when you’re logged in. We’ve retired the old flat blue look in favor of something that better matches the swanky new WordPress.com dashboard.

Here’s a before and after view:

The new admin bar is designed to command less attention — the previous blue bar had a tendency to clash with some themes. With the new design, the admin bar should recede into the background — available when you need it, not too noticeable when you don’t.

We’ve also included a few extra touches of style for users of the latest-generation browsers with the best CSS support.

Is there a feature of WordPress.com you’d like to see in the admin bar? Would you like the admin bar to be displayed in your dashboard? Leave a comment and let us know how we can make this feature more useful for you.

Now you can customize how avatars show up on your blog, including some cool never-before available options:

You can find these options under Settings > Discussion.

Here’s what you can do:

• Turn avatars on and off, which applies to their display on your blog.
• Choose a rating, which right now only works for Gravatars but as we integrate WordPress.com and Gravatar avatars better will apply to both.
• Choose a default other than blank or the mystery man.
• Laugh manically as you contemplate your new-found power.

I would highly recommend trying out Identicons, which are a cool math-based image idea created by Don Park that’s unique to the commenter, so even if someone doesn’t have an avatar yet they have a consistent (and handsome) image next to their name when they comment.

We’re probably going to make Identicons the default for the dashboard instead of the mystery man, we just need to make a few tweaks to Gravatar infrastructure first. (The generated avatars are CPU-intensive to create, and it’s Sunday, a day of rest for the busy Gravatar servers.)

Also, don’t Identicons sound like something from Transformers?

April absolutely flew, I have no idea where it went.

Here’s what you rascals did last month, with a few new and improved stats:

• 240,494 blogs were created.
• 281,729 new users joined.
• 2,533,704 file uploads. (Y’all use the new uploader a lot more.)
• About 740 gigabytes of new files. (Estimated, better number next month.)
• 317 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters. (Compare to last time we published transfer numbers.)
• 3,258,032 posts and 1,330,355 new pages.
• 5,775,721 comments.
• 4,903,485 logins.
• 655,178,604 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 408,359,440 on self-hosted blogs. (1,063,538,044 pageviews total across blogs using our stats system. We broke a billion!!)
• 63,730,680 pageviews in RSS feeds.
• 884,208 active blogs, where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 152,005,525 unique people visited WordPress.com-hosted blogs.

Random facts:

• About 30% of pageviews go to blogs with their own domains.
• 43% of pageviews to permalink pages.
• 30% of pageviews go to blogs in languages other than English. The most popular? Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian.
• 63% of our visitors were from outside of the United States.
• About 93% of pageviews were to people not logged in.
• People logged in somewhere using OpenID 84 thousand times.
• Blogs using the Digg3 theme got 5.26% of total traffic.
• There were 475 posts made via the Atom API (234,831 with XML-RPC).
• We sent 3,761,059 emails.

So many of our stats fall along 70/30 lines it’s scary.

Now for the juicy bits. Behold! Monotone.

Imagine a theme for photoblogging where every page looks like it was designed to match the picture. Monotone is a chameleon, it does sophisticated analysis of the image you upload to determine a complementary color scheme. The width of the page also changes based on the width of the photo.

You can see the demo site by clicking either of the images above.

Monotone takes the first (and only the first) image from your post and does its magic. Just make sure to select “full size” when you insert it. (The images must be uploaded to WordPress so we can resize them and extract out the colors properly. It also does best with BIG images.) The rest of the text is put below like a regular post. It only ever shows one post per page, but dig those archives.

A cool new theme, a new uploader, gigabytes of free space — you now have no good reason not to start a photoblog. Show the world what you’ve got. A week from today, if I remember, I’ll link to the coolest blogs using Monotone and will send literally dozens of viewers their way. Noel Jackson was the man behind the magic and we’re continuing to work with him on some top-secret projects.