Last month, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo announced the company’s new mission, which involves sharing and growing the world’s knowledge. He indicated that Quora would be expanding beyond the simple Q&A the site is known for. It appears that expansion has begun.

Today, Quora made a pair of announcements, including the launch of new blogs, and that of a rich text editor.

Like its Q&A, blog posts will be categorized by relevant topics (there are over 300,000 of them). These topics are, of course, followed by users, so these people will have a chance to read your blog posts.

“This is different than other platforms where your audience is dependent on how many people follow you personally,” says Quora’s Kah Keng Tay. “In addition, because of the way that Quora works (i.e., feed, search, the topic system, other distribution channels), your old posts and answers remain discoverable and re-discoverable as Quora’s audience grows.”

More on the blogs here.

The new rich-text editor is for the iPhone as part of a new update the company is launching. More on that here.

Quora says its active writers average 30,000+ monthly views and 350,000+ estimated annual views. Its most active writers average 90,000+ monthly views and 1+ million estimated annual views.

A little less than a year ago, Twitter announced that it acquired Posterous, though the companies said that Posterous would remain up and running “without disruption,” some users have now found that they are unable to sign up for new Posterous Spaces accounts.

TechCrunch reported on the finding after receiving a tip. As we’ve confirmed separately, if you try to sign up for a new account, you’re greeted with the following message:

Oh noes! Something went wrong.

There was an error loading the page you requested. Please try again later, or send us an email
at help@posterous.com.

According to TechCrunch’s source, this has been going on for over a week. Here’s what Twitter and Posterous said when they announced the acquisition:

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.

To our knowledge, no notice has been giving of any changes, and as TechCrunch notes, the Posterous URL-shortening service Post.ly is still up and running.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment, and will update accordingly.

Twitter launched embeddable tweets (though we’re partial to our own SocialDitto) late last year, but now they’re taking things a step further. The company is launching a new way to embed interactive timelines of tweets on any website.

“Whether it’s an author’s Tweets alongside their blog, a hashtag about an event like #DNC2012, or a list of competitors at the US Open, Tweets add a live, real-time dimension to articles, news reports, and the web at large,” says product manager Brian Ellin in a blog post. “These new embeddable timelines enable publishers, writers, developers, and any Twitter user to drop a rich, interactive piece of Twitter into their websites.”

Just as with embeddable tweets, users can interact with the embedded timelines just like they would be able to do on Twitter.com.

“Expand Tweets to see photos, media, and more,” says Ellin. “Start a conversation from the Tweet box, follow users that you discover, and reply to, retweet, or favorite Tweets directly from the page.”

To add a timeline to your site, simply add a line of HTML to deliver ANY account’s tweets, favorites, lists, search queries or #hashtags.

“These new tools are built specifically for the web: they load fast, scale with your traffic as your audience grows, update in real-time, and work great in modern, legacy, and mobile browsers,” says Twitter’s Sylvain Carle.

To create an embeddable timeline, you can do so from this new timeline settings page. More information can be found in Twitter’s developer documentation.

Compete has released its new analytics numbers for May. Following is a list of some of the web’s popular destinations for tech, business, search and social media news, and what Compete lists as their unique monthly visitors (US Only).

This is not a complete list of all publications covering these areas. Still, while some may cover other areas of interest, each is rooted in one of them primarily. The list doesn’t include the more general news sites, such as The AP, Reuters, The New York Times, etc., many of which do cover these areas extensively as part of their overall products. The list is not meant to be the state of the news industry or anything, but just a quick look at our industry’s unique audience landscape. Not all of these sites are necessarily in direct competition with one another. Some are much more niche than others. It’s not about comparing a site that only writes about Facebook, for example, with a site that covers the entire tech industry (or even more than that).

I’ve included a few popular sources of such types of news, which are more aggregators than publications, yet seemed worth including for perspective.

It’s also worth noting that Compete’s numbers are just that – Compete’s numbers. They’re often much lower than what sites’ internal analytics will reveal, and will differ from those of other products.

Finally, I want to stress again, that these are unique visitors. Not pageviews. If we were talking pageviews, the list would no doubt look much different. For example, Reddit announced earlier this year that it hit the 2 billion mark.

But anyhow, on with the list:

Compete lets you look at the data for any domain free of charge here, though they do require a sign-up these days.

WordPress announced a new tab on the WordPress.com home page and a new toolbar button for notifications.

“The first thing you’ll notice is that there is no number,” explains Andy Skelton of WordPress. “We axed it out of compassion. It all boils down to how people feel about inboxes. In giving you a notifications stream, the last thing we wanted to do was cause more stress! So we dropped the unread count and now the orange color simply means there are new notes since you last looked. An icon shows the type of your latest notification. The icon now also refreshes while you’re on a page, no need to reload a page to see new notifications.”

“You might also notice that unread notes are still white until you open them, which turns them gray. We didn’t entirely remove the concept of read/unread; we just stopped counting them. Feel free to turn them all gray if that’s your thing, or let some notes stay unread. Either way, we won’t pester you with a number.”

Here’s what the toolbar button looks like:

From the Notifications tab, you can scroll back through older notifications, and WordPress says it will be adding more features, as well as new notifications, for which the company says it has lots of ideas.

The changes don’t work with IE versions older than version 9.