WordPress.com - the hosted version - is slowly inching itself forward. It recently unveiled the  long-awaited launch of a spellchecker., which cames on the heels of some very cool widgets that provide some more personalization options. Slowly but surely, Wordpress is adding many of the must-have features that its growing legion of followers (and potential users) have been hoping to see. The question now is when Matt Mullenweg and the WordPress gang will get to the point where they will let Javascript be added so we can use value-adds such as Google Analytics, Blogbeat, etc. Matt will be in Toronto later this week at the iSummit conference so I'm hoping to get an update onWordPress's progress. It will interesting see how Mullenweg plans to evolve WordPress into more of a business rather than a enlightened, innovative public service. With SixApart recently raising more venture capital and the blogosphere still in its infancy, there are all kinds of routes that WordPress can take. The challenge is picking the right one.
Update: ecto has released a beta version of 2.0, which has struck a chord with Neville Hobson.