Great piece in the The Nieman Journalism Lab about how the Ann Arbor Chronicle is able to produce a top notch on-line only publication using WordPress as it’s publishing platform:

And this is what it feels like: 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from the 7 a.m. check-in with your spouse-turned-business-partner to the midnight bookkeeping.

No kids, no vacations, no car. No office; your only away-from-home base is a former Main Street antique shop that sells shared-workspace memberships to freelance software developers and the like for $100 a month. No novels before bed; there’s no time. If it’s a Saturday and the Michigan team is playing, you can watch the game, but run back to your keyboard during the commercials, okay?

As part of the morning routine, they check their WordPress dashboard for vital stats:

3. Inbound links checked daily. The day before I visited, logs for the Chronicle’s WordPress site reported that it had drawn 277 visitors from a local sports blog, 28 from a local school blog and 23 from annarbor.com, the reincarnated Ann Arbor News.

[ Visit Ann Arbor Chronicle ]

For publishers looking for a way to manage, publish, and track podcasts there is a great WordPress plugin called PodPress.

PodPress features:

* Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM and BitTorrent RSS)
* Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
* Podcast Download stats, with cool graphs. See below.
* Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
* Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
* View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
* Control over where the player will display within your post and what it will look like.
* Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
* Supports unlimited number of media files.
* Automatic Media player for MP3, OGG, MP4, MOV, FLV, SWF, ASF, WMV, AVI, YouTube, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
* Preview image for videos
* Support for separate Category podcasts
* Podango hosting integration

For more information, demos, and tutorials about PodPress, visit the PodPress plugin site.

The Technorati 100 is a list of the “biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by unique links in the last six months.”

John Conroy of CMSWire recently looked at that list and concluded that:

“Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second, and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust.”.

You can read Conrey’s full analysis here.