Along with the various other WordPress mobile options, there is now a WordPress for iPhone app available via the iTunes App Store.

Open Source and compatible with iPhone 3G, iPhone, and iPod Touch, this App works with WordPress.com and self-installed WordPress version 2.5.1 or higher.

Here is a quick video walk-through of the app:

The team at Incsub has written-in to let us know about a very exciting launch of Nationen! blog.

Nationen! blog is a WordPress MU (WPMU) powered site developed by Incsub in collaboration with Søren Pedersen of Ekstra Bladet, the largest Danish site on the web with more than 1.5 MM unique visitors weekly!

The installation integrates single sign-ons (SSO) with existing Ekstra Bladet accounts, provides CMS features for the front page and has built into it a range of powerful community features including internal private messaging email features, friend features, comprehensive internal statistics integration and a fair bit more:

Global tag clouds are also created from across the site and the posts displayed on tag and category portals on the front page:

In order to integrate more fully with the newspaper the front page also includes listings of latest videos from the online site nationen.tv as well as full MSS integration, with latest photos taken and sent in by mobile phone being displayed on the front page alongside latest comments, posts and popular content which can also be seen here: http://q.nationenblog.dk/

While the site has only been launched in beta for a month - it already sports over 300 blogs and is a great example of how a major media organization can use WordPress MU to set up their own blog network while keeping a tight integration with their existing site.

You can read more about this project over on incsub.com/nationenblog.

[ Visit Nationen! blog and Incsub.com ]

WordPress 2.6 is now available:

Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Here is a brief video showing the latest features:

Head over to the WordPress.org blog for more details.

The well known Webmonkey site, which is now part of CondeNet, has relaunched and selected WordPress for the monkey_bites blog:

It’s great to see such as fantastic blog , which is geared towards developers, on the WordPress platform.

As one of the commenters,  thepickledegg, remarked: “WordPress would be proud of the Webmonkey blog.”  We certainly agree !

[ Visit monkey_bites ]

A Way to Garden, a beautifully designed new WordPress powered blog has launched.

Focused on American gardens, it’s written by Margaret Roach who was previously garden editor at Newsday and most recently at Martha Stewart Living, first as its garden editor and then as editorial director for the company.

The new blog and Margaret’s story was covered in the New York Times recently.

[ Visit A Way to Garden ]

BlogTalkRadio, a social radio network, just announced a new round of funding.

Alan Levy, the CEO, posted on the company blog ( which is hosted on WordPress.com VIP ) explaining on how they got to this point and the power of bloggers and other individuals to create audio shows:

We launched BlogTalkRadio almost two years ago as an idea that we thought had some legs. As has been well-documented in the past, our theory was quite simple: Would bloggers, or in fact anyone, be interested in creating audio content using a phone? Would it be possible to create a new distribution platform and medium, where anyone with a phone and something to say could establish and build an audience? If this is such a good idea, why is no one else doing it? We had many more questions than answers.

Levy offers details on where BlogTalkRadio is today:

Fast forward from the fall of 2006 and we have broadcast close to 100,000 shows. We have had Academy Award winners, Presidential candidates, best-selling authors and many other notables. We have thousands of active hosts talking about the things that interest them and their audience. Our content is listened to more than 3 million times a month and as new content is created and added to the long tail, the number of listeners continues to grow rapidly.

[ Read more on the BlogTalkRadio blog & today's New York Times article ]

Over email I asked Zemanta’s Director of Products, Boštjan Špetiča, to discuss his firm’s new blogging discovery / auto-suggestion service and the WordPress plugin they recently released:

What is Zemanta?

Zemanta helps you create rich posts by recognizing your topic and suggesting useful links, tags, and pictures. So it makes the web experience nicer for both authors and their readers. Zemanta is a relaxed state of mind, where you focus on creativity instead of tricking the search engines to show what you are looking for.

How was the company formed, and where are you located?

The company is based in London and all our development is based in Slovenia, where the founders are from. Our core contextual technology was developed for a project for generating online archives of national television.

After that, we figured it’s a shame nobody is making this experience available to everyone online. We applied for Seedcamp, a European version of Y-combinator, won, and then moved everybody to London for a three-months geek picnic experience. Since then we’ve raised funding and launched the service in March of ’08.

Why should bloggers use the Zemanta WordPress plugin?

It’s painless, it’s pleasant, it takes most the friction out of creating the content. The question is, why would anyone not use it?

Describe the process you took to create the WordPress plugin.  Any lessons learned about plugin development you could share with others?

When we first started working on Zemanta WordPress plugin, we did not know much about WordPress platform or PHP. So we set a modest goal of making a plugin for version 2.5.

We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of information you can find on Codex or when that is not enough, in the WP community. Our advice to those, who might follow our footsteps would be to read introductory articles on Codex and read relevant parts of code of other popular plugins that perform similar tasks. It’s amazing how quickly you may reach your goal even if you are a novice when it comes to PHP and WP.

How is Zemanta different from other related-content products and services?

Some only offer some of the functionality (i.e. tags), some only help the readers instead of authors, some are simply hard to use. We are a one-stop-shop with special attention paid to usability and design.

We are also offering access to increasing number of premium content, where we make sure it is appropriately licensed. Sometimes people think we are just an interface to some picture search, while we actually do much more to deliver only the best select images.

What’s been the most surprising event since you launched your product?

Fred Wilson blogging about it. Twice.

What new features do you have on the roadmap that users of your WordPress plugin can look forward to?

Most prominent new feature on the roadmap is the ability to limit suggestions to your preferred trusted sources, or your friends or your own feeds. Along with more freedom at layouts, this will make our service very much personalized, as it should be in the social media.

Thanks Boštjan for your time. You can read more about Zemanta on their site, and download their WordPress plugin from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

Boštjan is the Director of Products at Zemanta, and blogs frequently at bostjan.konstrukt.it.

Brad Touesnard recently contacted us to let us know that he and his team launched a redesign for the British Columbia Cancer Agency’s 1.888.GOHAVE1 Web site.

This very important public health site, which is entirely powered by WordPress, utilizes a series of plugins including ajax comments, and email-a-friend:

[ Visit 1-888-GoHave1 ]

Lost At E Minor is a new site built entirely with WordPress — designed by Andrew Whitehead, developed by Christopher Jones and Cre8d Design , and experience/interaction design/strategy by Andy Howard ( previously profiled with The Roar ).

A visually impressive site, Lost At E Minor is an “online publication of trends and pop culture”:

Lots of interesting customizations are present in this site including:

A horizontal navigational carousel provides a deep dive to specific categories. … The right-hand column captures the pulse of the crowd… presenting the current giveaway and showcasing what the Lost At E Minor community is currently doing.

They’ve also allowed the readers to customize the look & feel:

The colour palette is customisable and the banners rotate to give readers a sense of ownership and to customise the site however they see fit. A footer designed to push readers into relevant archived content ensures the community can find constant inspiration, and a similar concept is employed on the single post page to discover related content.

[ Visit Lost At E Minor - and read more on Andy Howard's blog ]

Open Source Living is a new community-driven site focused on Open Source projects:

Through a simple, elegant and efficient presentation of resources and information, OS Living aims to highlight small and large OSS projects, to inform and raise awareness to OS ethics, and to reinforce the credibility of OSS as a viable alternative to corporate funded, closed source software.

The site uses a very clean layout and a smart use of tags and categories to organize the content in a very easy-to-use format.

In addition they deployed the WP-PageNavi plugin by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan to enhance the site’s navigation:

[ Visit Open Source Living ]