Leading blogging/podcasting/content management platform WordPress today announced that WordPress.com now supports email subscriptions for blogs:

This is a very simple way for your readers to subscribe to your blog and receive updates by email. Anyone can subscribe, whether they have a WordPress.com account or not. All you need to do is add the Blog Subscription widget to your blog and then you and your readers are ready to go.

If a visitor is logged in to WordPress they need only press the Subscribe Me! button, otherwise they can enter their email address.

All subscriptions require confirmation by the address owner, and subscriptions can be disabled at any time – the subscriber is in full control of what they receive.

It’s easy for new media content creators to undervalue email, because we tend to focus on newer, realtime communication options, like Twitter.

Email is still the communication tool of choice for many, though. This announcement means that WordPress.com users now have a painless way to offer email updates.

Note that this announcement is limited to WordPress.com hosted blogs.