What is word press. Do I need an account?

[Benjamin Cowles]

It was a page I used to click through to subscribe to a blog from here, no questions asked. Now suddenly they're asking for my credentials and assuming whatever they were they must have gotten lost in my browser's last cache cleanup so I attempted to sign in using my email to find out I never had an account. Strange? So... Do I need an account to subscribe to blogs here? And how was I doing it before? And what is it as it's not a simple 'create a username and password and get started' process it didn't appear.