Which Blog Platform Do You Use?
Thursday, November 15th, 2007;
-- Andy Beal |
New data from Nielsen Online shows Wordpress.com leaping over SixApart’s TypePad to take second place in the hosted-blog market. Here’s the new top five:
- Blogger - 34,104,000 users - up 58% from last year
- Wordpress - 11,440,000 users - up 444% from last year (wow!)
- Six Apart TypePad - 10,601,000 - up 20 % from last year
- TMZ.com - 7,107,000 - up 10%
- LiveJournal - 3,366,000 - up 27%
The numbers are only for hosted software platforms, so don’t include Wordpress.org, MovableType or Drupal.
Blogger has a huge lead but I wonder how many of those are active and not spam scraper sites? I remember the days when it seemed LiveJournal was the tool to use for blogging, but I instead went with Blogger. Now I’m a true Wordpress convert.
So what platform do you use and what’s your number 1 reason for your choice?
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November 15th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Wordpress, however I will say its a pain in the ass to get the darn thing SEO friendly, takes a good amount of work. Its real benefit however is the ease in which you can get it up and running.
I have started using Drupal lately. I find it to be kind of the opposite. Good on the SEO end (automatically blocks alot of the stuff in the robots.txt that you don’t need indexed) but does take a good amount of configuring.
November 15th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Wordpress is by far the most powerful and most customizable. There are also many plugins available to expand functionality. I don’t think Wordpress going to be just another fad like the others but will be around for a long time to come.
November 15th, 2007 at 11:11 am
I use Blogger, but I host it on my own server, plus I have designed my own template, so that my web site incorporates three Blogger blogs, but it looks like one web site. How I did this is explained at http://www.changingblogger.com
November 15th, 2007 at 11:18 am
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November 15th, 2007 at 11:51 am
I’m using WordPress, but hosted on my site. Agreed that it’s not completely seo friendly out of the box, but it is better than some CMSs I’ve come across.
I like the active development community around it. Chances are if I think of something I’d like WordPress to do someone else has already thought of it and written a plugin I can use.
I have heard some good things about Drupal and have noticed more sites switching to it in recent months and it’s something I’ll take a look at for myself when the opportunity arises.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
I use wordpress. Looked over the options and the plugin community is what sold me.
These are what I use to make things SEO friendly:
All in One SEO Pack
Robots Meta
Should take care of all the basic and intermediate issues you have SEO wise.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I’ve become a massive WordPress fan.
My initial days of blogging were in dasBlog (still running at http://www.u-g-h.com/default.aspx), having come from the Microsoft camp and wanting a .Net solution, but after a few years of watching other blog grow and develop, I moved to WordPress. It’s been a great way to teach myself PHP and MySQL and my CSS/Javascript skills have come a long way too, as has my appreciation of Open Source software.
WordPress itself is a magnificent piece of software, but I think one of it’s strengths is the community that has evolved around it: users, theme designers, plugin authors etc.
It would be interesting to see similar figures for self-hosted blog platforms.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
I use a stand alone app on my desktop called Vienna. (It’s a mac app)
Pros: It’s fast. Since everything is on my local computer, I can jump from post to post or feed to feed instantly, no waiting for anything to load.
Cons: If I go to another computer, i can’t log into my feeds.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
@Advice Network - not heard of Vienna. I’ll check it out.
I think Wordpress can be SEO friendly with just a few tweaks, plugins and careful robots.txt use.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
I used to use Blogger but switched to Wordpress. Like James, the plugins combined with good word of mouth is what sold me. I am with you in regards to Blogger’s numbers. If you do a blogger or even a blog search with Google you will get a ton of scraper and old blogger sites. How many of the 34 mil do you think are ACTUALLY legit?
November 15th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Andy -
Perhaps you would consider posting a blog about simple things users can do to optimize a wordpress hosted blog.
I switched from Blogger to Wordpress about two months ago. I couldn’t be happier about the way my new blog looks, however I have noticed a slight drop in organic traffic.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
@Casieg - maybe 34 - not 34 million, just 34.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
@Allan - are you on wordpress.com? That’s a little tougher than wordpress.org, but I’ll give it some thought. From what I recall, you can still get to the template code - you just have to pay a little extra.
November 15th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
I’ve used Wordpress for a few years now and have no intentions of using anything else. There’s a ton of support for it and some really great plugins that make life easy. Wordpress it is for me.
November 15th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
[...] love it when someone famous validates what I do. Such was the case recently when Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame printed a list of the most used blogging platforms: 1. Blogger - [...]
November 15th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
I’m sure you can guess my answer Andy
Even though I use Drupal for practically everything, I don’t think Drupal stacks up to WordPress if you just want to run a blog. However, if you’re like Aaron over at SEObook.com or other bloggers who eventually find that they want to build tons of other very dynamic CMS-type functionality - like job postings (classifieds), build custom nodes/content types, control views (content display), and so on, then Drupal or even Joomla is what you’ll need. Not WordPress.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:08 am
when I first started blogging I used a web-based platform…
after that my first blog ran on a Serendipity script… and I also used another script, but I cannot remember its name at this moment
after a period of time I discovered WordPress and since then… it’s my favorite
November 16th, 2007 at 7:41 am
Wordpress all the way. It has a bunch of useful plug-ins developed by users everywhere. That and it’s fully customizable.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:24 am
@Brian - you, a fan of Drupal? I would have never guessed it.
@Zen - that’s one of my reasons why I love Wordpress. It seems it has the most third-party plugins.
November 16th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Wordpress indeed. Such an easy and clean UI, and a fair stat display.
November 16th, 2007 at 10:54 am
I love Wordpress so much. Very clean and useful, not to mention open base development allowing artists and programmers alike to develop what we all want and need. I think if Google’s blogger doesn’t loosen up the rigidity of the style to the point of flexibility that Wordpress has, it will eventually become #2.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Wordpress. I haven’t used it as much as I should lately, but I also use some real estate blogs. REW, AR
November 19th, 2007 at 10:42 am
blogger and wordpress,
November 25th, 2007 at 11:03 am
With all the plug ins and ease of configuration for Wrodpress, I still find blogger the obvious choice because of it’s daddy Google.
Isn’t blogger the most SEO friendly or perhaps Google Search friendly?
December 23rd, 2007 at 11:14 am
I’m still choosing. But all my friends use LiveJournal.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:39 am
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June 29th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
what about ning?? I know it’s a social network platform, but it works great as a social blog tool.
August 5th, 2008 at 8:49 am
I am a wordpress addict! It looks good and it’s dead easy to use. The Wordpress team constantly create new features for Wordpress and update us via their blog… Wordpress is a community of people, unlike blogger for instance
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August 18th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
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September 8th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Wordpress rocks! blogger is waaaay to simple and it doesn’t look that good as wordpress. However the .wordpress.com that is added to the domain is not that nice as .blogspot.com
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