Martin A. Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations of the Times Company, said the company hoped to improve the publishing technology at the foundation of WordPress and harness the platform’s ability to aggregate blog posts.

First, the “publishing platform” is WordPress, the open-source software—not Automattic, the company. Is the Times confusing the two? (I mentioned earlier that the Crunchies seem to make the same mistake, and even core WordPress developer Mark Jaquith complains about it today.)

Second, WordPress does have some ability to aggregate blog posts by using the MagpieRSS PHP class, but it’s not been considered an essential part of WordPress before. Not to mention that MagpieRSS itself has been abandoned for about two years and has trouble parsing some Atom feeds. So aggregation seems like an odd reason to invest in WordPress.

So what does Automattic plan to do with the extra money? The same Times article cites CEO Toni Schneider as saying that it plans to invest in “other services, including an antispam filter and an online-identity product.” It’s probably a safe guess that he means Akismet, Automattic’s cornerstone, and OpenID. TechCrunch also mentions Gravatar and BBPress. Those are all worthy projects, so I look forward to seeing how the $29.5 million gives them a boost.

WordPress is the open-source blogging software hosted on WordPress.org. It’s sometimes referred to as “WordPress.org” to differentiate it from “WordPress.com,” which is a commercial site running WordPress Multi-User (MU) and owned by Automattic, the company headed by the lead WordPress developers. Because a number of the key people overlap between WordPress.org and Automattic, it’s understandable that people would confuse the two. However, Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress and founder of Automattic, often seems at pains to distinguish them.

But the folks behind the Crunchies don’t seem as aware of the distinction. On the one hand, WordPress.org put up a banner encouraging people to vote for it in the Crunchies. And Mullenweg seems to think that congratulations should go “to the entire WordPress community for this win. Just wait until they see 2.5,” that “2.5” referring to the version of WordPress.org to be released some time in the Spring. (WordPress MU, used by Automattic on WordPress.com is currently at version 1.3.)

But on the other hand, TechCrunch lists Automattic, and Giga Omni, WordPress.com, as the winner of the “most likely to succeed” category.

Clearly, though, congratulations should go to Automattic’s Toni Schneider for “best startup CEO,” which everyone agrees he won.

We’ll cover features that are often overlooked, we’ll highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality, and we’ll showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress.

From the description, it sounds like the WordPress Publisher Blog aims to be Automattic’s in-house version of Weblog Tools Collection, currently the leading source for news on WordPress plugins and themes.

Curiously, unless you look at the WordPress Publisher Blog‘s feed, you won’t know that the author of the posts (so far) is Automattic’s Raanan Bar-Cohen.