The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) announced the launch today of Investor.gov – a site focused on helping and educating investors:

Investor.gov is hosted in the WordPress.com VIP program, and uses a custom theme based on the GPL licensed Vibrant CMS theme.

Be sure to check out the video welcome message from Chairman Mary Schapiro for more details.

[ Visit Investor.gov ]

Sonin.mn, a daily digest of Mongolian top newspapers, has joined the WordPress.com VIP program:

According to Sansar Jiimen who runs the site, Sonin.mn reaches over 100,000 daily visitors – a really impressive achievement given that Mongolia is a country with a population of 2.5 million.

The Sonin.mn site was started in early 2004 and has been using WordPress since 2005.  Now that they are on WordPress.com VIP they’ve started to stream popular songs from the former Soviet era days of Mongolia, with plans to bring new video content online soon.

The team at Sonin has also announced that they will be spearheading a new effort to help improve the community-driven WordPress.com translation of Mongolian.

[ Visit Sonin.mn ]

Platinum Games Inc, an independent video game development studio based in Japan,  has selected WordPress.com VIP:

This innovative site was designed and developed by cnp_studio, and utilizes the new WordPress.com HD video solution.  Platinum Games took advantage of the video solution’s age verification feature,  which can be seen in action below for their highly anticipated Wii game — MadWorld:

This site is also an example of fast growing trend in using WordPress as a full site CMS.  As cnp_studio points out:

The site showcases what WordPress can do not only for maintaining a blog, but an entire Web site. The management of everything including pages, posts, sidebars and features is handled through the WordPress administration.

[ Visit PlatinumGames.com ]

Last night, the 2009 People’s Choice Awards, hosted by Queen Latifah, featured a Live Blog powered by WordPress.com VIP :

Specifically designed for live events, this blog uses an innovative WordPress theme with AJAX updates.   Developed by Crowd Favorite, the theme allows for rapid-fire postings by the bloggers with a user-friendly mechanism which alerts readers when new content is live (see screenshot above).

Congrats to Hooshere Bezdikian and the whole team at the People’s Choice Awards for an all around amazing event.

[ Visit blog.pcavote.com ]

Boy’s Life earns a badge as a new WordPress.com VIP.

Boys’ Life, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America, is a monthly magazine read by nearly nine million readers between the ages of 6 and 17.

The site is used as an interactive extension of the print magazine. Readers are encouraged to submit jokes, ask questions about gear or gadgets, share hobby tips, and participate in other ways. The site provides valuable scouting information for boys, such as merit badge requirements and scout law.

The Boys’ Life theme has numerous category templates for different areas of the site and displays information about reader submissions by using custom fields. Ratings and related posts utilize the Outbrain WordPress plugin.

[ Visit Boy's Life ]

With all the great coverage today of the U.S. Election an informative and truly funny source can be found on TIME’s Liveblog Election ‘08 site, powered by WordPress.com VIP.

Written by Michael Grunwald, James Poniewozik, and Karen Tumulty, the live blog includes gems like this:

7:21 p.m. – Michael Grunwald: Also hilarious on cnn: the constant scoreboard stuck at 8-3 for mccain. Ballsy of him to go for two so early in the game, don’t you think?

And this one too:

7:17 p.m. – Michael Grunwald: I haven’t even started drinking and wolf blitzer appears to be interviewing a hologram of princess leia.

[ Visit TIME's Liveblog Election '08 site ]

Science fiction writer John Scalzi has joined the ranks of WordPress.com VIPs.

John is the author of more than a dozen published titles. He has been nominated for five Hugo Awards, winning the 2008 Best Fan Writer Hugo. He also won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2006.

As he notes in a recent post, John made the switch because

This backend robustness and knowledge of the WordPress platform appeals to me, especially after a couple of months of banging my head against a wall trying to do things on my own.

[ Visit Whatever ]

Tonight’s U.S. Presidential debate is being streamed live on foxnews.com.

In a very innovative and useful way, Fox News has integrated user comments from their WordPress.com VIP blog On The Scene seamlessly into the live video stream.

This allows for greater user engagement and interaction and provides a real real-time feedback loop on how viewers are reacting to the debate.

[ Visit Foxnews.com ]

We are very excited about our newest partner in the WordPress.com VIP program, the National Football League, with their launch of blogs.nfl.com.

The NFL has partnered with WordPress.com VIP for both a rapid-fire news blog at blogs.nfl.com, as well as an expert commentary / user feedback set of blogs which are incorporated into the NFL’s exciting new web video application Sunday Night Football Extra:

On blogs.nfl.com you’ll find news and commentary about the NFL as well as insights and reports from the great Adam Schefter.

Sunday Night Football Extra will feature NBC and NFL Network analysis from the likes of Jerome Bettis, who will be blogging in WordPress.com with his thoughts on the game.  To see this in action head over to nfl.com during the game.

[ Visit blogs.nfl.com and Sunday Night Football Extra ]

Real Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, has relaunched his site on WordPress.com VIP:

The firm cnp Studio ( formerly profiled for their work with Sony ) did a tremendous job building the site and made great use of WordPress pages and widgets:

We created RealDanLyons.com for Dan to promote not only his blog, but his speaking engagements, books and articles. The site pulls inspiration from his new employer, Newsweek and in the interest of keeping things light and personal, Dan provided us images to use that were not the typical headshot (big thanks to Jeremy for those design skills).

Nick Gernert @ cnp discussed the benefits of WordPress.com VIP for a high-profile site such as this:

A first for us with this project was using WordPress.com’s VIP Hosting to host the site. This didn’t mean much difference for us in the development of the site except we know we don’t have to worry about high traffic days on the site, they do.  We still developed the site in a local staging environment running a standard install of WordPress. They assisted in taking things from staging to production and now future updates to the site are a matter of committing updates to a SVN repository

[ Visit RealDanLyons.com and cnp Studio case study ]