"It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/". Read the rest of the post here.

If you would notice there are only three themes and one of them (and the most popular one as of now) is called monotone. This theme is exceptional photoblogging theme. The theme changes color based on the photos which have been posted on the photoblog. You can see the theme in action on my personal photoblog. If you run a photoblog and are looking for a great theme, monotone is one of the best out there. I just wish they integrate the feature of exif data of photos being pulled (Wordpress now supports the functionality of exif data).

I personally think that this is a great move to leverage the power of both community and open source. I am sure that the purpose of bringing together the developers and giving them a centralized platform to display their work, talent and creativity is a great move.