An interesting development has occured in the WordPress.com community. Now you can get a WordPress.com Account without actually getting a wordpress blog with it.
Why would you want a WordPress.com username without a blog, they tell you why
* If you wanted to leave comments on blogs that require sign-in
* If you read a blog that uses our not-yet-released members-only feature
* If you are a writer on an existing blog, but don’t want a blog of your own
* If you just want an API key
And your subdomain is blocked, e.g. username.wordpress.com just incase you decide to create a blog later.
I know this is very useful because many times I have not been able to post comments to wordpress blogs due to lack of a wordpress.com login. And I did not want to create another blog just to post a comment.
In another instance, I activated the Akismet anti comment spam WordPress plugin on this site, and it required an API key to activate it, which could only be obtained when I created a WordPress.com account.
So this feature is very welcome and will surely help the community to grow better.