WordPress.com has crossed over yet another milestone in that they now host over 60 million blogs. After the GigaOm article has been updated, it now appears that half of the 60 million blogs are hosted on WordPress.com while the other half is on the self-hosted version of WordPress. This is a big number but unless those 60 million blogs are broken down into active sites, spammers, sploggers, dead sites, etc. then it will remain nothing but a big number. Touting big numbers is cool but showing how that number is figured out is even better.
Asides from the big number, I also wanted to point out the article that GigaOm published regarding this milestone. It has to be one of the most confusing articles I’ve ever read that mixes up WordPress.com and the open source project known as WordPress. For example, this sentence threw me for a loop:
Meanwhile, WordPress doesn’t plan to abandon its core allegiance to open source standards as it continues to expand as a for-profit company.
The sentence starts off with WordPress, then mentions open source standards and concludes with for-profit company. Even if you added the .com to WordPress that still wouldn’t make sense. Outside of all the confusion, the article itself is not bad considering it has a number of quotes from Matt when he participated in an on-stage interview with Mathew Ingram at the GigaOM RoadMap conference.
The big take away is that WordPress.com will be receiving a heavy dosage of social and mobile development.
Yeah, that was a silly article. I guess whoever wrote it didn’t understand what was WordPress and what was WordPress.com related.
Yea, that happens regularly across the media. Silly mistakes. They are sometimes in a hurry to be the first to break a news.
However, a great milestone for WordPress, no doubt. Congrats to them!