Let’s face it: You never really leave high school. The Internet realm is no different.

It can be hard to get your freshman blog noticed among the teeming masses of digital domains. Why? Last year the total tally of blogs hit 126 million, according to BlogPulse. That’s a big class to climb to the top of. We’re not saying you have to be head cheerleader, but it would be nice to get noticed.

So if the only IP address StatCounter has to report is your own, and your comments section features a chorus of crickets rivaling that field behind the cabin you visited last weekend (and posted about in painful detail), face it: Your blog is that pathetic, friendless kid who skulks under the jungle gym at recess and reads Lois Lowry books in the bathroom during lunchtime.

Consider this your letter home to the parents — no blog deserves that kind of social exclusion. Read on to pinpoint and correct its reader-repelling ways.

And so begins my Netiquette column on CNN, which I write with my Stuff Hipsters Hate co-founder, Andrea Bartz. Head on over to C to the NN for more.

WordPress 3.0 has just arrived on the scene — the thirteenth major release of the popular blogging software. It’s the result of six months of work from a total of 218 different contributors. You can download it now or upgrade from within your WordPress dashboard.

What’s new in 3.0? One of the best ways to find out is to try out the new Twenty Ten theme, which shows off many of the release’s (which is also called “Thelonius”) major new features, including custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus, post types and taxonomies.

Thelonius also features a lighter interface, more contextual help options, a boatload of bug fixes, bulk updates and much more. To learn more details about five of the most important updates, check out this brief and informative guide. This video from the WordPress team also explains some of the new features:

For those of you laboring on the backend, including developers and sysadmins, you might appreciate that MU and WordPress have finally merged. Now you’ll be able to run one or multiple blogs from the same installation.

Interestingly, the staff of WordPress/Automattic won’t immediately rush off to start work on WordPress 3.1. Founder Matt Mullenweg said his team will be taking some time to focus on things other than the core product.

“Over the next three months,” he wrote this morning, “we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless… We think this investment of time will give us a much stronger infrastructure to grow WordPress.org for the many tens of millions of users that will join us during the 3.X release cycle.”

Are you excited to use the new WordPress 3.0?