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.

Ecumenical Women (EW) is an international coalition of church denominations and organizations which have status with the Economic & Social Council (ECOSOC) at the United Nations. We train and empower faith-based advocates for gender equality at the annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held in February-March.

Ecumenical Women at the United Nations is seeking a Blogging Specialist to update and maintain its blog and website, www.ecumenicalwomen.org. Qualified applicants will be familiar with blogging and other social network tools, or demonstrate serious willingness to learn.  Applicants should be committed to women’s rights and gender equality, be comfortable writing about Christianity and other faiths.  Experience with advocacy, ecumenical organizing and the United Nations is preferred but not required.

The EW Blogging Specialist will be responsible for posting 4-6 blog posts per month, which s/he may either write or recruit others to write and edit.  Posts should be within the interests and advocacy goals of EW’s member organizations. The Blogging Specialist must be a clear and creative writer, an independent worker, and capable of working remotely.

Multiple writers will be chosen, depending on applicant pool. Young men and women from the global South and /or underrepresented groups from the north are encouraged to apply in order to deepen our blog’s perspectives.  Individuals from remote locations are strongly encouraged to apply, but Internet access is required. This position will last three months upon hire with opportunity for renewal. A stipend of $400 will be provided.

In your cover letter, tell us why you will be a creative and interesting blogger, and how you can help us improve our website.

To apply, please submit resume, cover letter, and two samples blogs of 200-300 words, including hyperlinks on topics related to faith, women’s rights, advocacy or the United Nations of blog posts by July 30th, 2009 via email (put “Blogging Specialist” in subject line) to:

Malte Lei   malte.lei AT elca.org

Ecumenical Women c/o Lutheran Office for World Community

Rebekka Højmark Jensen writes her last report about the youth summit of Aids 2031 (after the first posts here and here):

“Last day on the AIDS2031 Youth Summit. After some very intense days together with other young leaders this day was spent in company with established leaders i the fields of AIDS work, media and politics. The idea was to create ways to promote youth participation at all levels in decision making in the field of HIV and AIDS. Moreover, the goal was to secure support for youth led organisations. Whilst young people are already running organisations on their own initiative, they often have poor access to funding. The established funds do not have a policy to support youth led organisations seperately. However, this summit has made it perfectly clear that youth led organisations have a very special role to play in the fight against HIV and the stigma connected to it: Young people hold the key to communicate to other young people; Young people have the passion to do great things with few resources. As a result, young people are the ones who can turn over the situation and make way for a world in 2031 with less HIV infections, with less stigma and with less descrimination of positive people.

To change the situation, this AIDS2031 Youth Summit introduced a campaign called ”5% for the Future”. Very simply to call upon foundations to allocate 5% of their budget to youth led organisations!

I am really thankful that I had the opportunity to attend this meeting. Many very skilled and powerful people, both young and less young, reached enormous results during these few days in Norway. I leave a piece of my heart with each and every person who took part in the summit. I know we all share a common hope for the future and I leave from Gardermoen Airport with one big lump of this hope. God bless you all.”

Here is the second contribution (here is the first one) of Rebekka Højmark Jensen who currently attends the meeting of Aids 2031:

“The AIDS2031 Youth Summit is rolling on its second day. I am on the working group discussing how we can create safe spaces for youth HIV positive people. Spaces to talk, grieve, cry, scream, or simply just to be. One of the main solutions, as we see it, is to address schools, government and religious communities to secure that there will be safe spaces in the local environment. I find it devastating how many people have been excluded from there religious community because their status as HIV positives was revealed. Most of all this keeps people, who are actually religious, away from practicing their religion, from celebrating their life as given by God and from listening to the Gospel that tells us that God walks with us on our journey in life. This also creates a great ditch between the churhces and the HIV/AIDS organisations. The dialogue is extreemly challenged because the confidence between people living with HIV and the churches has been broken. I hope that in 2031, the inclusion of people living with whatever type of illness will be normal in religious communities all over the world. The ways to get there are many. First of all, I think we should see the other person as a person before anything else.

This Youth Summit is also a step on the way. It takes many aspects into account and will result in some very concrete plans for how to approach the issues of stigma and discrimination towards young positive people from now on and untill 2031.”

Aids 2031 is a global coalition that wants to make sure that there a real changes in the global fight against the virus. Currently, a small conference of young leaders is taking place in Oslo, Norway.

The website says: “aids2031, in collaboration with the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador HRH Crown Princess Mette-Marit, will hold a 2nd Young Leaders Summit in Oslo 23-25 June, 2009 to unite young leaders in the ongoing fight against AIDS related stigma and discrimination.”

On behalf of the Lutheran World Federation Rebekka Højmark Jensen, a young Lutheran theologian from Denmark is taking part in the conference. She writes:

“2031 is the year when HIV and AIDS has been with us for 50 years. The AIDS2031 is about what we have to do now to change the face of the pandemic in 2031. I came to the Youth Summit arranged by the consortium behind AIDS2031 with open ears to hear what the challenges are among the young people living with HIV today. The meeting started this morning, and already I am full of impressions. One person at my own age telling about being the only person in her family who is not positive which is why she can travel to Norway for this conference. Another girl, ten years younger than me, who was born with HIV and has had to live with heavy discrimination and stigmatisation since childhood. Others who spent a fortune on AIDS work because funding is not available for youth work.

Tomorrow we will discuss some solutions to carry forward. It will be demanding and productive because everyone is here to gain and give.”

2010 is going to be a busy year for the Lutheran World Federation. The end of July, it will have its 11th General Assembly in Stuttgart, Germany. Close to one thousand people will come together to learn, celebrate and make important decisions. 20% of the delegates will be young people under 30 years.

Already before that around 180 young people will meet for one week in Dresden, another German city to find a unifying vision for young Lutherans globally. In order to do that we need the help of a young person from a member church of the Lutheran World Federation. This intern will be invited to come to Geneva from February to November 2010. The main task will be to learn and build capacitiy to support the church back home. This will happen in the preparations for the both LWF conferences in July 2010.

If you want to learn more about this opportunity, please click here.

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.

Great opportunity for youth groups to apply for grants from UN Habitat.

Opportunities fund for Urban Youth-Led Development

Check out the small grants catagory for $5,000 – Deadline is June 15!

Here is a report on the leadership conference of the LWF member churches in Latin America and the Carrabean that took place at the beginning of May. Hellen Rios Carrillo has written it. She is one of the young delegates to the LWF General Assembly in 2010:

Al llegar e incluso antes de venir al evento de COP/COL me sentía con mucho entusiasmo porque venían mas jóvenes a ser parte del grupo; pero nerviosa porque era mi primera participación en un evento así.

Entusiasmada porque pude vivir de cerca la experiencia del  Entrenamiento Global de jóvenes lideres de la región de la América que tuvo sede en Nicaragua y sentir como la FLM  se esta preocupando por formar e incluir a los/as  jóvenes en las actividades de toma de decisión, y poder compartir las experiencias, de representar a la comunidad joven de nuestras iglesias.

Ahora que me encuentro en el Perú estoy mucho mas entusiasmada porque parte de las delegadas de Latinoamérica  en la COP/COL somos mujeres y JÓVENES que iremos a representar a América Latina en la próxima Asamblea de la FLM. Esto ha sido algo que me ha llenado de alegría y compartida por el resto de chicas, que en una  de las conversaciones bromeábamos con una frase: “Mujeres al poder”, porque en verdad nos encanta  este paso de equilibrar mas la asistencia e incluir mas a los jóvenes y mujeres y valorar así, de forma positiva nuestra participación y aportes. Los/as jóvenes empezamos a sentirnos sujetos dentro de la FLM.

Quizá para algunas de nosotras algunos de los temas y las discusiones tratadas resultaron un poco complejas (porque incluso para algunos adultos lo son) y optamos por escuchar atentamente a aquellos(as) hermanos(as) que tenían mas experiencia, pero creo que eso es parte de nuestro  proceso de aprendizaje, parte de ir reconociendo el trabajo que se hace desde arriba y darnos una idea del gran esfuerzo que se hace en conjunto de compartir y ser parte importante de los desafíos y logros de todas nuestras iglesias hermanas.

El 18 de mayo los jóvenes tendremos una consulta en línea, y el tema principal es la Renovación de la FLM, gracias a que tratamos el tema aquí pude comprender mejor y tener mas herramientas para aportar a la consulta. Tendremos la oportunidad de proponer, como dice la consulta, desde nuestra perspectiva de jóvenes.

Visitamos una comunidad en la región de Lurin y pudimos observar el trabajo que ahí se realiza, esto me acerco mucho a la realidad de las comunidades de mi país, ya que la cotidianidad a veces no nos permite valorar en toda su dimensión el esfuerzo que nuestros pueblos  hacen por subsistir y salir adelante, esta visita me permitió apreciar en la lejanía el trabajo de las comunidades donde mi iglesia tiene incidencia viendo logros similares en otro país. Fue interesante el sentimiento de “visitante” y no parte de la comunidad.

Agradezco esta oportunidad de poder participar y poder aportar desde nuestra percepción de jóvenes nuestras experiencias. Resulta valiosísimo para nosotras ya que nos hacen parte activa en la comunión de Iglesias Luteranas; pero sobre todo porque se nos considera capaces de aportar y de aprender.

“The scale of the HIV epidemic remains daunting and young people remain disproportionately affected, accounting for 45 per cent of new adult infections in 2007.” This one of the highlighted sentences in a report by UNICEF UK that was released last week. The title says already a lot: “Preventing HIV with young people: the key to tackling the epidemic.”

The report itself gives an overview of the challenges in different regions of the world. A striking finding is that in Africa young women and girls are much more likely to become HIV positive. That is not the case in other parts of the world. To cite again the report on page 8: “In Southern Africa, adolescent girls are 2 to 4.5 times more likely to get HIV than males of the same age.”

Many member churches of the LWF have HIV and Aids work and many also prevention campaigns. But obiviously, it is far from enough. Churches have to demand a clearer policy in their countries and young people themselves have to make it topic.  Young people have to raise the issue for their own sake. That is also an act of Christian love. Those who are the most vulnerable to being infected are also those who are hard hit already: For examples those who don’t have parents.  Christian love among people means also: More prevention efforts.

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).