WordPress.com is open now

Yesterday I accidentally caught the rumour that WordPress.com is now out of beta.

Oh? I thought, that’s nice — let’s try and verify.

Matt on WordPress doesn’t have any information on this — the Akismet front page mentions that you can now sign up without an invitation. In an undated but apparently recent interview with Matt Mullenweg the interviewer mentions that WordPress.com is now “available to the public”.

Aventually I hit on the announcement that Matt made on his personal weblog on November 21: WordPress.com Open:

We’ve decided to open up WordPress.com for signups without invites for a bit. The service has been scaling very well since we got the problems from the move worked out. With that done and WordPress 2.0 in its final stages, there is a lot more time to focus on some cool features and common requests for WP.com now. (The design there has been updated, but is still just a placeholder.)

So here it is: WordPress.com isn’t “out of beta” — it just has been opened up “for a bit”.

I wish they’d be a bit clearer about the “for a bit” — and I wish they’d make announcements like those officially, on WordPress.com rather than on a developer’s personal weblog.

To sign up for a free WordPress.com weblog, go here. Will it stay free? Yes, they say.

Tagging a Serow

Back on Wednesday, which was a public holiday, I went up to Gozaisho-Dake and took a a bunch of photos.

There’s a zoo dedicated to sheep and goats and antelopes up on the mountain peak, which includes a few chamois from, or so the plaque says, the Swiss Alps. I would have liked to take a picture of them, but they kept moving and were hard to get through the wire mesh. The one that was sitting still was resting was in the shadow, so that didn’t make a good photo either.

Nor did I get a decent shot of the Japanese serow, a very rare animal.

I found one on Flickr through the wonders of tagging, though — one on Gozaisho-Dake, even.

Here’s how that went. I first tagged some of my photos as gozaisho, then went on to all public photos tagged with gozaisho, where I found this lovely shot of a Japanese serow. I tagged it as “serow”, so when you’re looking for a serow on Flickr now, you will find one with a simple tag search.

Also, I find the serow has a strange facial expression. It looks puzzled, bemused. It doesn’t quite understand what’s happening — like it just woke up and isn’t fully awake yet.

Media Links

I’ve put together a page of News Links that you might useful. It’s a selective list of English-language newspapers sorted by country, followed by a few non-newspaper media links.

Also: the International Herald Tribune has just published a piece on a huge new wave of blogging in China.

English students on Flickr

Back on Thursday, I signed up a couple of students from the Tawawa Mie Journal to the photo sharing site Flickr. Here are their accounts.

It’s too early to judge, but they do seem to like the site and enjoy the conversations that photos can engender.

Go Switzerland!

Huh? I’m not paying close-enough attention to sports. The Swiss national football team (that’s “soccer team” for those of the American persuasion) has apparently had a very good season, and they topped it off yesterday when they qualified for the football World Cup 2006 in a game against Turkey.

Who’d have thought? Switzerland is definitely not among the great football nations — with a population smaller than Tokyo’s it has every right not to be — and I’ve got used to the idea of Switzerland not participating in the World Cup. Some poking in the German edition of the Wikipedia revealed, however, that Switzerland has participated seven times:

1. 1934 in Italy
2. 1938 in France
3. 1950 in Brazil
4. 1954 in Switzerland
5. 1962 in Chile
6. 1966 in England
7. 1994 in the USA

We never got further than the quarter finals, though. Maybe we will next year? Turkey weren’t that bad in the last World Cup, were they? They beat Japan.

On a sidenote: the World Cup logo has to be one of the worst pieces of graphic design ever created for an international sporting event. What were they thinking? WHAT ON EARTH WERE THEY THINKING?

JapanBloggers webring updated

The JapanBloggers webring got started by MJ of Cerebral Soup in April 2003 and lists weblogs written in and about Japan.

As of yesterday, the webring runs on a brand-new, database-backed system to which all ring members had to resubscribe.

The webring currently has 77 members — that’s well short of the 199 Japan-related weblogs currently listed in Kurt Easterwood’s right sidebar, but it’ll fill up in time.

Related: the JapanBloggers Flickr group sports interesting photography from across the country, and there’s conversation to be had on the JapanBloggers mailing list.

Spiky

I like to take walks down at the beach. Recently I’ve noticed that whenever I returned from a walk, my jacket sleeves were bristling with slender, quill-like seeds that attached themselves to the fabric with three prongs each. I had never noticed the plant from which they came, though.

Yesterday I spotted it, and I happened to have my camera with me:
wild burdock.

Needless to say, I was clumsy enough to transform myself into a walking pincushion while trying to get a good picture of that plant.

Wikipedia

A wiki is something like a weblog — the main difference is that readers of a wiki can do more than just add comments to an article; they can modify the article, add to it, improve it. Thus, wikis are great tools for writers to work together on a text.

The biggest and most widely used text created in this fashion is
the the Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia entirely written by its users.

The Wikipedia is a work in progress: it’s incomplete, and some of the information it provides is inaccurare. This is where I thought students of English could help out and provide some of the missing information as well as do some fact-checking and replace the information that is inaccurate.

For example, take the Wikipedia article on Tsu, the capital of Mie Prefecture. It’s a pretty short article to begin with, so there’d be lots of other information to fill in. Some of the information is also outdated, such as this: “The closest airport is Nagoya Airport, about 60 km to the northeast”. This is no longer true, and the link would need to be updated to Chubu Centrair International Airport.

I think my students could do some of this work. It wouldn’t only be great exercise in online collaboration, it would also be useful to other people and improve the value and accuracy of the Wikipedia.

No speeding!