Matt Mullenweg announced on his blog this week that all free WordPress.Com accounts now come with 3 Gigabytes of disk space available. This is HUGE - considering that space generally costs money on the web and 3GB is rather generous. The space increase for WordPress.Com users is not only useful, but greatly appreciated!

The space is increased from the original 50MB - that’s quite a leap!

More details can be found at the WordPress.Com News Blog:

Much of the work we do at Automattic is behind the scenes, infrastructure you’ll (hopefully) never notice or see, but we’re always thinking about how the improvements we make to the foundation of the site will allow us to build more interesting things on top of it.

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Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

The simple answer to the often asked question of whether or not you can advertise or monetize your WordPress.com blog is: NO.

Unless you are a VIP hosted member of WordPress.com. You can read about the WordPress VIP Hosting Services here. Unless you are a VIP member, there is no way for you to advertise on your WordPress.com blog. Thing twice before you consider VIP hosting, however. It carries a hefty $600 set up fee and $300 per month to carry the VIP status. That may sound like a lot - but, objectively speaking, it’s worth it if you have a blog that does the kind of traffic they’re talking about. I did a post on the VIP hosted services previously - have a look.