The Wordpress team announced the immediate availability of the next major relese of their popular blogging and content management system last night. This site is run partly on WordPress, and other parts of the site have been extensively re-written to take advantage of the WordPress theme system.

We’ll be upgrading very soon, and this should offer some tangible benefits for users: Faster page loading times, more complete feeds and more. It looks like 2.1 also solves some minor problems for us too!

 You can download the new release at WordPress.org. Read on for more information on the release.

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Blogging reached Nature some time ago. So - if you think you are into Neuroscience - this may be of interest:Action Potential is a blog by the editors of Nature Neuroscience - and a forum for our readers, authors and the entire neuroscience community. We'll discuss what's new and exciting in neuroscience, be it in our journal or elsewhere. We hope for spirited conversation!

But if genetics is your poison then this may be more your line of country:

Welcome to

Free Association, the Nature Genetics blog. Check here regularly for links and editorial comment on research and news in genetics, as well as reader feedback. To contact the editors directly with confidential questions or feedback, please e-mail 'freeassociation at natureny.com'.

If science in general is your thing and you just want the headlines to listen to on your home multi-media sound system or on your iPod (perhaps through your car radio in that traffic jam?) Then their new PodCasts are for you..

Nature Podcast

Each week Nature publishes a free audio show, presented and produced by Chris Smith and Anna Lacey at the University of Cambridge, UK, and sponsored by Bio-Rad.

Each show features highlights from news and articles published in Nature, including interviews with the people behind the science with in-depth commentary and analysis from journalists covering the research.

If you are a real science junkie you probably need this:

ScienceBlogs
Seed magazine has recently launched a site called ScienceBlogs, which brings together a number of good blogs, including several we read frequently and link to on this page (Pharyngula, Gene Expression, The Intersection, Evolgen). As a result, the URLs of these blogs have changed, and we’ll be updating these shortly. The new site abandons some of the idiosyncracies that characterized the design of the individual pages (for better or worse), and provides a one-stop shop for those who like a daily dose of science blogging.

Of course I am not really a science junkie - I am a radio addict. So all this information comes through BBC Focus: the world's best science and technology monthly…

From Adam Curry: could we listen to this and follow it up? Try it out? Know about it?

I just wrote a script to cut down on publishing time on the daily Source Code shows. Now when I’m done recording I drop the finished file into a special folder on my desktop, this triggers an applescript that does the following:

Change name to dailySourceCode+today’s date. Add id3 tags. Upload to server. Create a blog post via metaWeblog api to Radio UserLand. Delete desktop file. Tell me if it worked.

Amazing all the steps I used to make to publish the show! This script will work with OSX and any weblog software that understands the metaWeblog api

Here is a sample of his blog….

Auricle

Making RSS syndicated feeds suitable for Human Beings. This article looks at how best to incorporate an RSS feed into your weblog!

So here is a further test…
The wife’s grandpa.

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BBC NEWS | Technology | Gates backs blogs for businesses
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Maybe we should think twice before deciding to use MovableType 3.0 as we will have to pay for it if we want it to serve all our blogging purposes. See this page - MovableType 3.0 - Disappointment for more information

Yesterday Typepad released a set of new facilities. Worth us looking at…

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Big blogger

The British Council are sponsoring eight journalists from around the world, to report daily on the World Summit on the Information Society via a blog. Asides from indicating the significance the British Council places on this new form of web publishing, it’s interesting to consider the impact of the blog on writing. Blog writing is somewhere between public and private discourse. The diary format situates the writing; it had no pretentions to transcendentalism, because it is writing composed in a specific place and time. The eight writers of the British council blog reminds us that this kind of writing is collaborative whilst the daily updates remind us that writing is always an act in progress…

During our recent Spoken Word international workshop I had a coversation in passing with Mike Fegan about the inadequacies of the two RRS standards. Did not have time to pursue it but I am not the only one who has thought about /usr/lib/info || Comments || OAI for Blogs. This is only one of several links where the issue is being raised…

I am wondering if blog entries would be useful in an OAI repository exactly as you describe. I wouldn’t see it replacing RSS readers by any means, but it could help deal with the large number of blogs that look interesting when you start to max out on what you can check in a day. I have no idea how trivial or how hard it is to add OAI to any of the popular blogging options like Moveable Type.