Over the past few months, Automattic’s popular blog platform WordPress.com has taken an in-depth look at their blogging ecosystem, and realized that one of the major pain points for the 12.1 million users who self-host their WordPress blogs is security and restoration. WordPress.com backs up all of the blogs that it hosts, but those users who self-host their WordPress-powered blogs need to download outside plugins, such as this one, or use backup services like Mozy or Backupify to protect their data and content. Today Automattic is changing that with the launch of its own blog protection and restoration service for self-hosted blogs, called VaultPress.

Currently in private beta, VaultPress is a plugin users can download that acts as a backup service for your blog. Not only will the software help keep your blog up and running, but it will also soon monitor your site to alert you if their is suspicious activity or a hacking. Alternatively, VaultPress will eventually update your blog with security hot-fixes automatically. VaultPress will be a paid service and will probably be in the ballpark range of $15 to 20 per month, according to Automattic VP of User Growth Paul Kim. At first VaultPress will be extended on an invitation only basis and will eventually be open to the public in the near future.

While users can still use outside services or WordPress community plugins, VaultPress will be the only WordPress.com branded offering. And the plugin is tightly woven into WordPress.com infrastructure, promising greater operability, says Kim.

Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg says VaultPress is one of the most advanced technologies that he’s seen interact with WordPress. The vision of the service is to ensure that every piece of content on WordPress-powered blogs and sites are safe, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups.

VaultPress as a product makes sense for WordPress.com and frankly, I’m surprised that the blogging platform didn’t roll this out earlier.

Disclosure: TechCrunch uses the VIP hosted version of WordPress.com.

If you’ve read about random video chat site Chatroulette lately, you’ll know that it is filled with naked people and journalists. And that’s exactly what The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart found in his exposé of the Web service. In between the random pervs, he actually found more journalists looking for pervs, or something.

The clip has cameos from Katie Couric, Keith Olbermann, and NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who insisted he wasn’t cruising or anything. The parody is great linkbait (at least for tech blogs) and pretty funny to boot. But you will only find it on the Daily Show’s own site (where it can be grabbed and embedded).

It’s clips like these that make Hulu wish Comedy Central didn’t pull its videos and go it alone.

As he both tweets and blogs about, Haggerty will be joining Twitter’s fast-growing mobile team. At LinkedIn, Haggerty did a lot more than the iPhone app, he also built the apps for the Pre and the BlackBerry. He also helped build the Buzz application that let companies scan information about them on yes, Twitter.

So what will a mobile UI guy be doing at Twitter? Well considering they just updated their previously awful mobile UI to something much nicer (on phones like the iPhone, at least), who knows. Maybe they’ll update it again. Or maybe they’ll even start dabbling in their own native mobile applications. But would they dare do that and risk alienating the many third party developers working on platforms like the iPhone? We’ll see.

Twitter has been hiring other UI people recently as well. And they continue to pull new employees left and right from some of the most well-known companies in Silicon Valley.

Update: We also hear that another LinkedIn employee is joining Twitter: Taylor Singletary, a LinkedIn evangelist and product manager will apparently be doing API evangelism at Twitter, we hear. While Singletary has confirmed that today was his last day at LinkedIn, he has yet to officially state where he’s going next — though he does tweet about birdies…

[thanks Brad]

Enterprise content management juggernaut Open Text has bought content analysis startup Nstein Technologies for $34 million. Nstein’s Text Mining Engine helps businesses centralize, understand and manage content through semantic and text analysis.

For example, Nstein powers the backend of The Financial Times’ semantic search engine, called Newssift, that indexes about 4,000 business news sources, from online newspapers and blogs to news portals and research sites.

Open Text’s digital media solution help its customers manage rich-media content, so Nstein’s technology should boost Open Text’s existing offerings. Last year, Open Text, which is a publicly traded company bought up 3-D interface innovator Vizible.

As you may have noticed, TechCrunch was down for an extended period of time this afternoon. In case you haven’t read about why yet, it’s because WordPress.com suffered through some 110 minutes of downtime, as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has explained just now on the company’s blog.

TechCrunch is one of the millions of blogs hosted on WordPress.com (not to be confused with sites that run the WordPress software but are hosted elsewhere). All told, some 10.2 million blogs went down — wiping out some 5.5 million pageviews, WordPress estimates. This was their worst outage in 4 years.

So what happened?

Mullenweg says WordPress is still gathering details but their initial diagnosis is that “an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site.” He notes that this also tripped up all the mechanisms to prevent a total failure, so that occurred. Luckily, no data was lost in the outage, it just simply could not be sent out.

Mullenweg ends with, “I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.” So say we all.

Yesterday we broke the news that Aardvark, the social search engine, was being acquired by Google for $50 million. Aardvark confirmed the acquisition to us yesterday (though they didn’t comment on the amount), and now Google and Aardvark have publicly announced the deal with posts to their official blogs, along with some more details about how Aardvark will be integrated with Google.

Unlike some of Google’s past startup acquisitions that  resulted in services shutting down or restricting new user signups, Aardvark is going to continue running at full steam.  New users can still sign up, and it’s already featured as part of Google Labs (though it hasn’t been integrated with Google search at all — it’s just a link to Vark.com).

As far as changes to the service, a Q&A on the Aardvark blog says that they’ll be able to move faster as Google puts its support behind it (some Googlers will be joining the Aardvark team).

After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in exchange for a post.

The intern in question has admitted to some of the allegations, and has denied others. We suspended this person while we were sorting through exactly what happened. When it became clear yesterday that there was no question that this person had requested, and in one case taken, compensation for a post, the intern was terminated.

This was not one of our full time writers, and so the frequency of posts was light. Nevertheless, we’ve also deleted all content created by this person on our blogs. We are fairly certain that most of the posts weren’t tainted in any way, but to be sure we’ve removed every word written by this person on the TechCrunch network.

Our attorneys have advised us not to disclose the name of the individual because the person is not a legal adult. We also think that, given the intern’s age, it may not be appropriate to make their identity public.

We are all shaken here at TechCrunch – this is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community.

I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.

Update: Daniel, the intern in question, has decided to talk about this situation publicly on his blog. I’m glad that he has. You can read his thoughts here.