Remember National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) back in November? You all used the opportunity to take a swing at churning out a 50,000-word novel on your blogs in only one month — some with great success!

There’s also NaBloPoMo, which has nothing to do with post-modernism, but with blogging! It stands for National Blog Posting Month.

It’s an even more fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you. And maybe the best part is that it starts whenever you want it to! The only objective is to post every day for a month. So why not begin with July? To make it official, sign up here. It’s open to anyone with a blog, anywhere in the world.

The NaBloPoMo team provides a theme for each month, which isn’t mandatory, but is a nice way to gain inspiration that can kick off your daily updates.

Not into that? Then we suggest sticking to the stuff you’ve been blogging about all along — the things you experience and love — with the added caveat of keeping it on the regular.

If you run out of steam, you can always find ways to blog about the dozens of weird celebrations and holidays that take place in July, in addition to Independence Day in the U.S. — like Ice Cream Soda Day, Video Games Day, or Bugs Bunny’s Birthday.

To plug the WordPress community into your endeavor, we suggest using NaBloPoMo09 as a tag on each post you publish to your blog. They’ll show up on the tag results page, which is also a great place to get inspired by your fellow bloggers.

A note: Please refrain from commenting with questions about NaBloPoMo in response to this post. It’s not a WordPress project. Instead, check out their FAQ to learn more about its objectives and requirements.

Happy (daily) blogging!

Last month we launched the Yahoo! App and 360 importer so you can migrate your content to WordPress.com quickly and easily. And we introduced the SocialVibe widget, which helps you earn donations for the charity of your choice. July will bring more feature updates, and more of the themes and customizations you’ve been asking for. We’re listening.

Here are the stats for June:

• 388,580 blogs were created.
• 5,845,417 posts were published.
• 411,540 new users joined.
• 5,800,941 file uploads.
• 3,633 gigabytes of new files.
• 810 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 8,330,617 comments.
• 6,841,633 logins.
• 1,245,935,191 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,245,882,985 on self-hosted blogs (2,491,818,176 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 2,153,176 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,447,021,840 words.

Plus:

You published 37,894 posts using the WordPress for iPhone app.

The new GigaOM Pro launched, powered by BuddyPress.

WordCamps in June: WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Brasil, and WordCamp Dallas.

WordCamps coming up in July: WordCamp Montreal and WordCamp UK.

You spend a lot of time creating great content and attracting an audience for your blog. What if you could use that influence to make a positive social impact? Now you can.

We’ve teamed up with SocialVibe, and now by adding the SocialVibe widget to your blog, you are able to earn donations for the charity of your choice by getting sponsored by a brand that appeals to you.

Each time someone visits your blog and engages with your brand (by rating a video, for example), you’re making a difference. That impact is immediately visible on your badge, i..e., ‘My blog has provided 63 cups of clean water for people in need.’

The money donated comes from your brand, so you and your readers never have to pay a dime.
In addition to earning donations, you’ll also get feedback from your charity about the difference they’re making thanks to you. By clicking the charity logo in the badge, you can find information about your cause and view real-time goal progress.

Setup is easy and only takes a few clicks – just go to Appearance->Widgets in your dashboard, add the SocialVibe widget and pick a cause and a charity. For more details you can find documentation in our support area. If you change your mind about your sponsor or cause, you can easily make adjustments by visiting your widget dashboard.

If you are running a self-hosted WordPress blog, be sure to grab the SocialVibe plugin.

With SocialVibe, our community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world.

Sorry for this being the latest wrap-up ever.

May was a fun month for us. We rolled out a ton of new features: the ability to add YouTube videos and polls to comments, stats in your time zone, the VideoPress upgrade (with HD!), post by email, new stats charts, comment search, improved comment reply by email, and VideoPress.com.

May was also the month for our largest-ever WordCamp San Francisco. Mission Bay Conference Center was a packed house, but (amazingly) everything ran on schedule, and nothing went wrong! A round of applause is due to our sponsors, speakers, and everyone who attended for helping to make WordCamp such a smooth success. Thanks for making it all possible.

For post-event coverage of WordCamp, check out the updated site for WordCamp San Francisco 2009.

And now, the stats for May:

• 387,416 blogs were created.
• 411,704 new users joined.
• 5,504,742 file uploads.
• 3,333 gigabytes of new files.
• 826 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 8,625,931 comments.
• 6,914,546 logins.
• 1,243,177,638 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,207,143,849 on self-hosted blogs (2,450,321,487 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 2,105,723 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,728,890,160 words.

Plus:

There were 12,123 post-by-email posts since the release of that feature on May 12.

Video uploads are on the rise after the release of the VideoPress upgrade: 5,587.

WordCamps in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Milan, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp San Francisco.

WordCamp San Francisco had 739 pre-event registrations (a huge jump from 427 last year), and 789 actual attendees from 32 countries — plus 15 speakers, six sponsors, and lots of volunteers.

WordCamps in June: WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Brazil, WordCamp Dallas.

Health.com has launched the Ask the Natural Living Experts forum hosted on the new TalkPress VIP service.

We’ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and we’ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com

Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. We’re working on making it .com/.org universal.)

Thanks to Yahoo! for their help with their Yahoo! Application Platform, and thanks to all of you for the best blogs on the intertubes.

If you need help with either of these new toys (or anything else), please contact our support team.

We are facing so many bandhas, few weeks ago; there was bandha in terai for more than a month. Today there is Kathmandu bandha. It seems like bandha has become our culture- to demand anything we have a culture of bandha and chakkajam. Is it a solution? Is it only the best option to raise the voice? If we are really responsible citizen then we should say “NO” to all kinds of bandha. The bandha culture will lead us no where.

Say No to bandha..

ACT NOW!

The tasty new logo

We’ve been busy lately here at WordPress.com — we’ve had an announcement of a new or updated feature for you every day this week. Today, you’re getting a two-fer!

Earlier this week, we announced VideoPress, the great new video feature for WordPress.com. Now VideoPress has its own home on the web at VideoPress.com. We’ve also got a great video introduction created by our company auteur Michael Pick, so be sure to head over and check it out. We’ll be continuing to add features to VideoPress, including support for WordPress.org users, so stay tuned to VideoPress for all the latest.

P.S. If you’re a design geek like me, you might be interested to know that the VideoPress logo (as well as all of VideoPress.com) is set in the beautiful Museo family of typefaces, designed by your fellow WordPress.com bloggers at the exljbris Font Foundry (exljbris.wordpress.com).

Since opening up the comment reply via email feature to everyone last month we’ve been continuing to improve it. Here are some of changes that have gone in during the last few weeks:

• Better detection of email auto responders / vacation messages
• Added a reminder to the bottom of comment notification emails about the reply via email feature
• Vastly improved support for non-English character sets
• Fixed a problem that some iPhone users were seeing
• Improved email address parsing for Blackberry users
• Fixed cases where signature blocks weren’t being properly removed
• Better paragraph formatting when parsing comments

And many little tweaks to deal with the oddities of various email clients. You’d be amazed how many email clients have their own little quirky ways of doing things.

For users who don’t include quoted reply text in your emails I do want to point out that you’ll need to end your email comment reply with !END on a line by itself. We’ll detect this in place of quoted reply text and use everything above the !END line as the new comment. This is mentioned on the comment reply via email support page but I wanted to bring specific attention to this to avoid any confusion.

We want to make comment reply via email 100% for every user, so if you have any problems with it at all please contact support. Or, if you just want to hi, that’s okay too

You guys are generating an amazing amount of feedback on your blogs. Matt mentioned in the April Wrap-Up that there were 8.6 million comments! Comments are flying in every second of the day.

And have you ever had one of those blog posts that was good, but the real action was in the comments? The blog post is only half the story, it’s the feedback from everyone else that fills in the rest. To make it easier to find the second half of these stories we’ve added comment search to WordPress.com search.

Select the comments options from the WordPress.com search page and we’ll hunt through the millions of comments that have been added to WordPress.com blogs to find what you are looking for. To reduce the comment inferiority complex you get many of the same features and options as post search: sorting by relevance (the default) or most recent, limit results by blog (like site:gigamom.com) and an easy way to subscribe to new matches via an RSS feed ( the Follow this search via RSS link at the bottom of the sidebar).

Comment search, because it was about time comments got a bit more respect.

I have been reading the Facebook status and comments from young Nepali people, most of them who are abroad but it’s really frustrating to read the comments from different young people. I doubt that if they really know what the politics mean? Are they aware about the Nepali political history? Blaming is the easiest thing in this world… If we keep on blaming then one day one will be left and we will end on ourselves…. is this what we want? Or??? A responsible citizen first think about his or her responsibility rather than blaming others..

I am very sorry being straight to the points…but I want to ask to all the people who are blaming other to think what they have contributed to the nation rather than just giving non sense comment on this kind of sites and Facebook…
My recommendations to all people please read the Nepali political history and analyze the present and provide the comment…

Thanks

If you’ve looked at your WordPress.com blog stats today, you might have noticed the charts look a little different. We’ve replaced the old proprietary chart object with Open Flash Chart, an open source alternative.  Charts now look like this:

(Though I can’t guarantee you’ll see numbers like that).

All the old charts are still available in more or less the same form.  And we’re hoping to explore some of the new possibilities Open Flash Chart has to offer – so keep an eye on your stats.  Like we had to ask.

And in case you missed it: yes, blog stats now work in your time zone.

राजनीतिले प्रभाव नपार्ने कुनै पनि विषय र क्षेत्र हुदैंन भलै केही मानिसहरु ू राजनीति भनेको फोहोरी खेल हो राजनीतिमा मलाई कुनै चासो छैनू भनेर उम्किन खोज्छन् तर उनिहरुलॆ के बुझ्नु पर्दछ भने राजनीतिले समाज र राष्ट्रका हरेक क्षेत्रमा प्रभाव पारिरहँदा त्यस प्रभावबाट उनिहरु पनि मुक्त हुन सक्ने छैनन् ।

कतिपय युवाहरु राजनीतिको कुरा गर्ने वित्तिकै मुन्टो बर्टान थाल्छन् । तर त्यस्तो प्रवृक्तिले उनिहरुको चेतना स्तर न्युन रहेछ भन्ने कुरा झल्काईरहेको हुन्छ । पछिल्ला केही दिनका राजनीतिक घटनाक्रमले शान्ति प्रकृया र संविधान निमार्ण प्रकृयालाई नराम्रो धक्का लागेको छ ।

यदि यस्तै अन्यौलता कायमै रह्यो भने संविधान समयमा बनाउन सकिदैंन र यदि संविधान समयमै बन्न सकेन भने त्यस बेला अहिलेको भन्दा पनि भयानक संवैधानिक र राजनैतिक जटिलताको अनुभव हामीले गर्नु पर्ने हुनसक्छ । सौचौं त…… त्यत्तीबेला हामी कहाँ हुन्छौं जब सबै विकल्पहरु समाप्त हुन्छन् त्यस समय पुर्पुरोमा हात राख्दै आफुले गरेका गलत कृयाकलापको पश्चाताप गर्नु बाहेक हामीसंग अरु केही बाँकी रहनेछैन । त्यस समय गोहीको आँशु चुहाँउदै कुहिनो बजार्ने र हाम्रो कमजोरीमा आफ्नो फाइदा देख्ने अन्र्तराष्र्टिय शक्तिहरुको निर्विकल्प दवाव हामीले सहनु पर्ने हुनसक्छ ।
वितेका केही दिन देखी गैह्र राजनीतिक युवाहरुको ठुलो समुह वर्तमान गतिविधीहरुले निम्त्याउन सक्ने गम्भिर परिणामबारे चिन्तित छ । युवा भन्ने वित्तिकै एक त मनोरन्जन पिक्निक रमाइलो डाङ्गडुङ्ग मात्रै सोचिने या राजनैतिक दलहरुमा आवद्ध युवाको झुण्डलाई बुझिने गरिएको यस समयमा राजनीति प्रति सचेत राजनैतिक चेनता भएका तर कुनै पनि राजनैतिक दलको झण्डा मुनि नबसेका लाखौं युवाहरुले आफ्नो आवाजलाई समयमै उठाउन जरुरी छ ।
आवाज उठाउने भन्नाले कुनै माग राखेर आन्दोलन गर्ने सडकमा टायर बाल्ने चक्का जाम तोडफोड गर्ने जस्तो साघुँरो दायरामा मात्रै सोच्नु हुदैंन । यो युवा पुस्ताले बुझेको छ एक एक जनताको करबाट बनाईएको सार्वजनिक सम्पक्तिको मुल्य कति छ भन्ने कुरा…॥ प्रतिकृयाको राजनीति गर्ने अनि भावावेशमा आएर आन्दोलन गर्ने कामले देशलाई कुनैपनि कोणबाट हित गर्दैन भन्ने कुरा आज सम्मका गतिविधीबाट प्रस्ट भएका छ ।
राजनीतिको कुरा गर्ने वित्तिकै दलका नेताहरुको सक्तो सराप गर्ने अरुलाई मात्रै दोष दिने अरुलाई आरोप लगाउँदै आफुलाई चोखो सावित गर्न खोज्ने प्रवृत्तिले भन्दा फरक भएर अगाडी बढ्नु पर्नै आव्श्यकता छ । किनभने अरुलाई आरोप लगाएर अरुलाई दोष दिएर र अरुका कमजोरी औंल्याएर हामीले आफ्नो कर्तव्यलाई भुल्न पाउँदैनौं । यो समय कसले कहाँ गल्ति गर्यो भनेर सोच्ने मात्रै होइन हामीले आफ्नो तर्फबाट के गर्यौं भनेर घोत्लिने समय पनि हो ।
यो देशमा राजनैतिक दलहरुमा आवद्ध युवा कति होलान् २ लाख ५ लाख तर जनसंख्याको करिब ३५ प्रतिशत हिस्सा ओघट्ने अरु लाखौं कराडौं युवाहरु जो देशको वर्तमान परिस्थिती प्रति साच्चिंकै गम्भिर छन् ति युवाले संगठित भएर सकारात्मक दबाब दिन सक्नुपर्छ । यदि हामीले यस समयमा हाम्रो उर्जा र सिर्जना शक्तिको उपयोग गर्दै रचनात्मक भुमिका खेल्न सकेनौं भने देशको इतिहासको सबैभन्दा जटिल र संवेदनशील राजनैतिक प्रकृयामा शहभागी हुनबाट हामी विमुख हुनेछौं । तर हाम्रो भुमिका यतिबेला घटनाको साक्षी बन्ने मात्रै होइन ।
यस्तै किसिमको अन्यौलता कायमै रहेर शान्ति प्रकृया र संवैधानिक प्रकृया धरापमा पर्यो भने हामीले पानी माथिको ओभानो हुने छुट पाउनेछैनौं र त्यस दुर्दषाको दोषी हामी पनि हुने छौं ।
कुनै पनि विकसित देशको इतिहासलाई पल्टाएर हेर्ने हो भने त्यस देशको एक पुस्ताको योगदान र त्याग रहेको हामी पाउँदछौं । अब पालो हाम्रो आएको छ । यो देशले हामी सबैको सार्थक भुमिकाको खोजी गरेको छ । यतिबेला हामी आफ्नो पढाई जागिर परिवारलाई देखाएर आफ्नो भुमिकाबाट उम्कन सक्दैनौं ।
भोली डुङ्गा डुब्यो भने के हामी बाँकी रहन्छौं अब प्रश्न उठ्छ हामी के गर्न सक्छौं हाम्रो भुमिका के हुन सक्छ निश्चित रुपमा राजनैतिक दलहरुले हामीलाई स्थान दिनेछैनन् त्यसैले हाम्रो लागी स्पेस हामी आफैले खोज्नुपर्छ । यति बेला कलाकार व्यवसायी विधार्थी कृषक संचारकर्मी जागिरे कृषक सबै युवाहरुको एउटा खुकुलो संयन्त्र बनाई हाम्रो आवाजलाई जोडदार रुपमा राख्न सक्छौं । ताकी त्यसबाट राजनैतिक दलहरुलाई सकारात्मक दबाब दिन सकियोस् । हाम्रो आवाज के हुन सक्छ त हामीले कुनै दललाई ठिक र वेठिक अनि कस्को कति गल्ति छ भनेर छुट्याउनु हुदैंन । हामीले राजनीतिक प्रकृयामा भए गरेका त्रुटि औंल्याउनु पर्दछ र त्यसलाई सुधार्ने दिशामा दबाब दिनु पर्दछ । यतिबेलाका प्रमुख दुई राष्ट्रिय मुद्दा भनेको शान्ति प्रकृयालाई तार्किक निश्र्कषमा पुर्याउने र अर्काे भनेको समावेशी र जनताको चाहानालाई सम्बोधन गर्नै किसिमको संविधान तोकिएको अवधी भित्रै बनाउने हो । यि दुइवटा प्रकृया संगसंगै अघि बढ्दा राजनैतिक दलहरु विच ठुलो विवाद आउनसक्छ र त्यो विवादमा एकले अर्काे विचारलाई निषेध गर्न खोजिइन सक्छ । हामीले त्यस्ता खाले कुनैपनि संवादहिनताको अवस्थामा राजनैतिक संवादलाई अघि बढाउन दबाब दिन सक्छौं । राजनैतिक दल विच संवाद अघि बढाउन सहजकर्ताको भुमिका खेल्न सक्छौं ।
संविधानमा लेखिने कुरालाई व्यापक जनबहशमा लग्नको लागी त्यसमा युवाको व्यापक शहभागिता बढाउने कृयाकलाप गर्न सक्छौं । र जबसम्म इतिहासमै पहिलो पटक नेपाली जनताले आफैले संविधान लेखिसक्दैनन् त्यत्तिबेलासम्म हामीले आफ्नो सकृयतालाई कायमै राख्नुपर्छ ।
हामीले अहिले नै केही गरेनौं भने हामी चुक्ने छौं र हाम्रो चुकाईको मुल्य धेरै महँगो सावित हुनसक्छ । यसर्थ देशको कुनाकुना देखी काठमान्डुसम्म आफ्नो दैनिकीमा व्यस्त गैह्र राजनीतिक युवाहरु एकपटक गम्भिर भएर सोचौं यदि हामी अघि बढेनौं भने कोही बढ्ने छैनन् ।

Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at work…? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email we’re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.

Maybe you’re on holiday and want to show your journey. Maybe you’ve captured something with your cell phone that you just have to share. Maybe you’re at work and should be doing something else. With Post by Email you can keep everyone up-to-date without even opening a browser.

Post by Email is super simple to use. From the new My Blogs menu you can generate special email addresses:

You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.

Now for the fun part – send an email!

You can send email from any email client, whether in a browser, on your desktop, or from your cell phone, and as much formatting will be retained as possible.

Attachments are not left out, and your images will be included and automatically converted into thumbnails.  If you include multiple images they’ll be converted into an attractive gallery.  Now you can take photos anywhere and have them appear on your blog in moments.

If you’ve purchased the Space Upgrade then MP3 attachments will be displayed using our audio player. If you’ve purchased the VideoPress upgrade then you can also include videos.

There really is no easier way to get media onto your blog.

If this hasn’t whetted your appetite, here’s a quick run-down of Post by Email features:

• Transcoding of any video files supported by the WordPress video player (mp4, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, and m4v).
• Automatic removal of standard signature blocks, with support for manual removal of other signatures.
• Add your email addresses directly into your address book using downloadable vCards. (You don’t even need to remember the address!)
• Automatic notification of a published email post.
• Conversion of YouTube URLs into embedded videos.

For advanced users wanting that little bit extra, full control of your post is possible through special shortcodes, with details provided on the Post by Email support page.

It’s time to start emailing again!

You may have noticed that videos around here have been getting higher and higher quality.

I don’t just mean the cool content from WordPress.tv, but the video player and video/audio quality itself.

We’ve rewritten how videos work here on WordPress.com from the ground-up and taken inspiration from the great products at Vimeo and Smugmug, and are pleased to formally offer our video upgrade to everyone. Here’s a sample of what it can do especially for those sweltering in the heat right now:

With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.

Videos can be streamed and embedded here on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.

The video feature was part of the space upgrade previously and for those that helped us test it we have now extended a one-year free video upgrade. We just want to make sure existing video users can continue to use it without any hassle. For new users, the video upgrade costs about 5 bucks a month.

As an added bonus, each video has stats attached to it so you can see how often they’re being viewed, and more stats are coming.

If you’d like to geek out, here’s some technical information about the encoding of videos and such, and the entire VideoPress WordPress video player and transcoder is under the GPL and open to the world.

In the future we’ll be working on giving your viewers more options for streaming and downloading videos, better and more in-depth stats, more player customization, and a way for WordPress.org users to use and embed the new player easier.

In April we introduced Instant Findability, TED video embeds, a springtime theme, a cool new domain, and reply-by-email for comments, now open to all. A pretty busy month, with more awesome features on the way, plus WordCamp San Francisco, on May 30.

If you’re in town or want a reason to be, be sure to register soon. We’ve got a great speaker line-up, free WordPress schwag to give away, and, of course, a BBQ lunch.

Here are the stats for April:

• 370,053 blogs were created.
• 401,320 new users joined.
• 5,206,156 file uploads.
• 3,050 gigabytes of new files.
• 775 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 8,691,962 comments.
• 6,991,335 logins.
• 1,162,296,607 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,130,311,791 on self-hosted blogs (2,292,608,398 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 1,904,262 active blogs and 19,665,407 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,569,961,240 words.

Other cool stuff:

After tallying the community vote, the judges panel (Derek Powazek, Matt Thomas, and myself) selected two winning designs for the I <3 Blogging design contest. You can now buy “Dandy(lion) Blogging” by el_square and “I Love Blogging (and Pixel Art)” by Robert Podgórski in the Infectious store as vinyl stickers for your laptop, iPod or iPhone. Congrats to the winners and all who submitted their work.

Though we released comment reply via email late in the month (April 23), you’re already making great use of it. 1,029 replies to comments via email just in the final week.

Video uploads using the WordPress player are on the rise, too: 5,290 in April. If you haven’t already checked it out, head to WordPress.tv to see what your videos could look like in the WordPress player (and to learn a bit, too). If you like what you see, you can purchase the Space Upgrade to get uploading.

We launched BuddyPress 1.0, a collection of plugins that transform a vanilla WordPress MU install into a social network.

WIRED.com migrated its blogs to WordPress, and Intruders.tv relaunched their channels using WordPress MU.

WordCamp Central was redesigned, and now has an awesome map that displays WordCamps around the world.

There were six WordCamps in April: WordCamp China, WordCamp Hong Kong, WordCamp NOLA, WordCamp Tokyo, WordCamp Nigeria, and WordCamp Reno-Tahoe.

Coming up in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp Milan, and WordCamp San Francisco.