Aside from working on WordPress.com and their other products, one of the priorities of Automattic is keeping their employees healthy. With that, the company recently came up with an idea for Worldwide WP 5K which will allow Automatticians (employees of Automattic) to run/walk together for 5K (3.1 miles) on the same day and be able to exercise together as a company even though they’re from different places across the globe.

The folks from Automattic are not only concerned about their personal health but also with that of WordPress users. That’s why they’re inviting all WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org) users to join them in their Worldwide WP 5K.

Here are more details from the official blog post:

WHAT IT IS: A 5k run/walk (approximately 3.1 miles). You can run, walk, or skip. It’s up to you. There’s no time limit and there’s just one requirement: that you participate! [Updated: You can do it inside or outside, on a treadmill or on a track, or even do a swim or a bike ride instead of running/walking - just get moving!]

It’s roughly equal to:

• 3.1 miles
• 12 laps around a track
• approximately 6000-7500 steps
• approximately 50-60 minutes of brisk walking

WHEN: We’re all busy, but we want you to participate, so we’re giving you some flexibility, too. The WWWP5k is set for Sunday, April 10th, but you can do your walk anytime from April 4th -10th (you’ve got a week to fit it in). Just post about it and use the tag “wwwp5k” so we can find you (and for a chance to be Freshly Pressed). :)

WHO: Anyone who’s ever used or loved WordPress (and your families and friends, too).

HOW: You’re welcome to blog your entire route and your preparation (videoblog, perhaps?) but above all we’d love to see where you are and how you’re completing your 5k. Give us a picture of you and what you see when you cross the finish line and tell us your location as you complete your 5k with the rest of the world.

I think that it’s a very cool idea, especially for Automattic to invite bloggers, specifically WordPress users to participate in this event. Staying healthy should be a priority for bloggers and we shouldn’t just focus on making money online, increasing traffic, improving writing skills, improving site performance, search engine optimization, etc.

Although it officially starts on Sunday, April 10th, you can start today, tomorrow or anytime this week as long as you complete the 5K. Personally, I plan to participate in Automattic’s Worldwide WP 5K or WWWP5K by running on the treadmill tomorrow for 50-60 minutes. If I can’t complete it by tomorrow, I’ll continue it the next day.

What do you think of Automattic’s Worldwide WP 5K? Do you plan on joining this event? If so, how (run, walk, swim) and where (track, park, treadmill) are you going to do your 5K?

Now that WordPress.com users are starting to get more features that previously were only available to WordPress.org blogs like premium themes, it’s now WordPress.org blogs turn to get features that were previously only available to WordPress.com users.

How? This is all made possible by Jetpack, a plugin released by Automattic last week that brings WordPress.com features and functionality to WordPress.org or self-hosted WordPress users.

Here’s an excerpt of Matt Mullenweg’s post on the Jetpack blog:

Today we’re launching the first version of what’s been a dream of mine for several years now, really since my State of the Word presentation in 2009: a way to provide feature parity between WordPress.com and WordPress.org for everybody.

Our users have been banging down the door for this. Every time we launch something new on WP.com the first question is always asking how people can get it for their self-hosted blog. Now you can have your cake and eat it too — host your own blog, completely under your control and with the freedom of the GPL, and still get all the cloud goodies of our hosted service. It’s the best of both worlds, the decentralized and the centralized, the control and the convenience, the peanut butter and the chocolate.

For the initial launch, Jetpack will include eight of the most-requested features –

• Gravatar Hovercards: Find out who’s commenting on your posts with enhanced information for Gravatars (includes full name, bio, other web profiles).
• WordPress.com Stats: Keep on top of your traffic with powerful and simple to understand statistics for your site.
• Twitter Widget: Keep your readers more up to date by syncing your tweets to your site via a simple widget.
• Shortcodes: Quickly add movies, images, and more to your posts and pages with a single line of code.
• Shortlinks: Automatically creates an easy to copy/paste mini-url for any post on your site.
• LaTeX: Use the famous markup language to quickly create beautiful mathematical expressions and equations.
• Sharedaddy: Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks.
• After the Deadline: Your writing will improve thanks to this artificial intelligence based spell, style, and grammar checker.

Personally, I haven’t tried Jetpack here on JaypeeOnline but am planning to do so one of these days. Anyways, kudos to Matt Mullenweg and the rest of the WordPress team for creating and releasing Jetpack so self-hosted WordPress users like me can use WordPress.com features on our blogs.

Download Jetpack and supercharge your self hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.

Anyone here who’s installed Jetpack into their self-hosted WordPress blog? Which initial feature do you like the most? What other feature/s would you like to see added to Jetpack? Please share your thoughts.

In this Where’s Wally? inspired version of WooVille, we thought a quirky, tongue-in-cheek representation of the WordPress theming community was in order. You’ll find all your favourite theme providers in the colorful WooVille eco-system, but your challenge is to find the WooNinja hiding somewhere…

WooVille#5 Where’s Woo?

[click here to view large version]

It took me about a few minutes before I saw the WooNinja hiding in the picture. Have you seen it yet? Anyways, I think there are more WordPress community members that could’ve been added to the picture like WP Tavern, Theme Lab, WP Recipes, etc. but maybe WooThemes didn’t have enough space for everybody. Maybe we’ll see a second version of this comic that features the other left out WordPress community members? Btw, the design on the DIYthemes building has gathered some mixed reactions. Some look at the building’s design as a cheapshot on DIYthemes, depicting a crumbling building while others see it as a building made up of puzzles or a building that’s under construction which is done in reference with their name DIY (Do-It-Yourself).

If you like this WooVille web comic and would want to buy it as a poster, head on here. WooThemes is planning on selling it in poster form (dimensions: 23.39 × 33.11 inches) for around $20-30 excluding shipping.

How do you like the Where’s Woo? WooVille web comic? Any other WordPress community member you think should be added to the picture? What do you think of the DIYthemes building design? Do you see it as a cheapshot on a competitor or a design that represents the Do-It-Yourself theme? Please share your thoughts.

Blogging

• 5 Techniques to Make Your Next Post Unforgettable
• Should Your Content Aim for Traffic or Conversion?
• Are You Stubborn Enough To Have a Blog?
• 3 Things Probloggers Should Do Before Hitting The Publishing Button

WordPress

• Automattic Becomes a Domain Registrar
• How to Easily Modify User Contact Info
• 6 Cool Android Plugins for WordPress
• Adobe migrates 1,200 blogs to WordPress from Movable Type

SEO

• Latent Semantics and How to Check it in the SERPs
• Is Google Broken? Sites Big & Small Seeing Indexing Problems
• How Google Categorizes Web Pages and Search Queries
• Critical Thinking & SEO – Managing Learning and Your Approach to SEO

Technology

• Google testing high-speed fiber network at Stanford
• Firefox 4′s JavaScript Now Faster Than Chrome’s
• Adobe Releases Its Own HTML5 Video Player
• Top 10 Specialty Web Browsers You May Have Missed

Gadgets

• Inexpensive Solar Power Comes to Lego Mindstorms NXT
• KDDI new Cyber-Shot Phones S006 comes with a 16.2Mpix CMOS Sensor
• Tegatech Tega v2 review
• Students Show Off Applications for Microsoft’s Adaptive Keyboard Prototype at UIST

Pinoy Blogs

• Apple introduces 11.6″ Macbook Air
• Internet Usage in the Philippines 2010 : How Many Filipinos Are Online? Latest Figures
• Supreme Court: There’s Basically No Such Thing as Plagiarism
• Business Marketing Through The Results Triangle

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

• GoDaddy $7.99 .COM Domains Special Offer
• Google Chrome For Filipinos
• Automattic Now A Domain Registrar
• New Wibiya Dashboard
• WordPress.com Introduces Text Messaging Service
• Verizon To Offer $600 Samsung Galaxy Tab Nov 11
• Palm Pre 2 w/ webOS 2.0 Coming Soon
• WordPress for BlackBerry 1.4.4

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article or find an interesting story that you want to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

Automattic, the company behind popular blogging service WordPress.com as well as the open source blogging software WordPress has recently been granted an ICANN registrar accreditation. This means that Automattic can now begin selling domain names directly to WordPress.com users.

Since WordPress.com blogs don’t have their own custom domain names, domain mapping has been one of the most popular WordPress.com upgrades. In the past, Automattic has partnered with GoDaddy for providing custom domain names for its users.

Here’s Matt Mullenweg’s announcement posted on his personal blog:

As some folks have noticed already, Automattic is now a “real” domain registrar (ID #1531). This has been a goal of mine for several years now, chiefly because I am a bit of a domain collector myself and I’ve never been completely satisfied with the domain buying or management experience on any of the usual players. Second, custom domains are a popular feature on WordPress.com and should become even more popular with some changes we’re introducing this month and it’ll be good to be able to provide a fully integrated experience for our users there. It’ll be a few months while we build all the tools necessary to begin taking advantage of our registrar status so in the meantime we’ll continue to use Godaddy, who has been an excellent partner.

This new development makes sense if you look at what Automattic has done in the past few years – acquiring several companies/Web services like Gravatar, BuddyPress, IntenseDebate, PollDaddy, Blo.gs and After the Deadline. All of these acquisitions were made to improve and add more features/options primarily to WordPress.com blogs and at the same time for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Now that Automattic can sell domain names, the process of acquiring a custom domain for a WordPress.com blog now becomes fully integrated into the service and not via a third-party company like GoDaddy making it easier, smoother and probably even cheaper.