WordPress.com announced yesterday that all users get three gigabytes of upload space for free. This is a teensy upgrade from 50MB.
This seems to be primarily for psychological reasons, because there’s a big fat * after the upgrade.
The footnote is that Mr. Mullenweg mentions in this post that “[y]ou still need a space upgrade to upload certain file types, like movies”, and later in the comments that “[y]ou still need a space upgrade to be able to upload MP3s”. So you still have to pay them if you plan to do anything significant with their bandwidth. (Not sure where they stand on humongous zip files, or similar.)
Not that this is wrong of them. It rings a bit of being an arbitrarily large number chosen for PR reasons, but that’s understandable.
The 3 gig limit is very reassuring to an important segment of the blogoratispheroidalmass. Specifically, the people without their own hosting, who want to be able to post their photos on their blog and not worry about having to trim out old ones after a few months.
50MB = 300-500 decent quality JPEGs of photos. It’s easy to imagine that being a problem after a short while. 3 gigs… not so much.