Welcome to the “closed beta” of MediaBugs.

Um, what’s a closed beta, you ask? Truth is, it’s not really all that closed. We’re giving accounts to pretty much anyone who asks. We haven’t locked our test site away behind a lock and key. We’re just not heavily promoting it or passing around its URL while we get things in order.

What we are doing is inviting a relatively small group of people — friends, well-wishers, experts, people who’ve told us they’re interested in the project — to help us in two ways before we fling open the doors more widely:

(1) Reporting some errors in news coverage, some initial media bugs that we can seed the site with — so that those people who come by once we’re more fully public can get a quick sense of what we’re all about and how things work here.

(2) Reporting our bugs back to us so that we can provide the wider public with as smooth an experience as possible.

We’re figuring on this phase lasting two to four weeks. If you want to help out, just get in touch and we’ll send you the seekrit entry info.

After long but happy labors in the trenches we’re close to having a site and service ready for people to use!

Over the next few days we’ll be doing a final cleanup and then inviting in a small bunch of initial users to kick the tires, find our own bugs, and give us a first round of feedback.

Some of you have already asked to help out — thanks! If you’re interested in joining in, let us know — just email us at info [at] mediabugs.org.

And for those of you who’ll be at SXSW, I’ll be there too — pull me aside and I’ll give you a demo.