Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg has announced that WordPress.com, a free blog hosting service, has updated the amount of space it allocates to each user to 3 gigabytes:

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.

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Most typical bloggers will never need anywhere 3 gigabytes of space – so there’s really only one way to read this move: Mullenweg wants you to be a podcaster on WordPress.com.

Here’s his rationale for the change:

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.

This is an interesting move by Mullenweg. It will challenge other podcast hosts to deliver more. It will grow the number of WordPress.com users making rich media files available as podcasts, whether or not the users consider themselves podcasters.

Unfortunately, Mullenweg’s “freedom to blog rich media” doesn’t currently include video:

You still need a space upgrade to upload certain file types, like movies, and we’re also increasing the limits of the paid upgrades, so if you bought a 1GB upgrade before it now adds 5GB for no additional charge.