I found an article on Royal Pingdom recently, delving into which blog software and services the top blogs use. (Blog software is something you host yourself like WordPress.ORG; blogging service is something hosted on a third party server, like Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress.COM)
Finding all this out is actually quite a hard process. RP checked Technorati’s index of their top 100 blogs, to see what each blog service was using. Sometimes it was just a matter of checking the source code, other times they had to Google it, and still others, they had to email the site owner to ask.
The results were actually a little surprising. You would think that a lot of top blogs like CNN, Google, and other mega-corporate blog sites would have some custom-made, super-secret formula known only to two people in all the world.
Turns out that of the top 100 blogs:
- More than one-third of them are hosted on a service like Blogger (3), AOL-owned Blogsmith (14), TypePad (16), and WordPress.com (5).
- More than half have blogging software: Custom-made (8), Drupal (4), Movable Type (12), and WordPress (27)
- Very few of the WordPress.org blogs have upgraded to 2.7.
- Traditional media sites like Entertainment Weekly, CNN, and Wired use blogging services — WordPress.com, Blogger, TypePad — for their blogs; most of them have chosen TypePad.
So what can we learn from all this?
- While custom blogging software is nice, only 8% of the important blogs have it. This isn’t rocket surgery, it’s very simple (and yes, I meant to say “rocket surgery”).
- You can have some very important blogs with free software. If you need to spend money on blogging, don’t spend it on software.
- It’s not the blogging software that makes you a success, it’s the content. People want to read what you have to say. They don’t care about your software.
- Frequency of posting is important to a blog’s success. Everyone of these blogs posts many articles per day. For a blog to have any chance of success, you need to post at least 2 – 3 times per week. Daily is better.
- WordPress and Movable Type make up more than 60% of the top 100, 32% and 28% respectively. We happen to like WordPress here at Pro Blog Service, but we also recognize we have to be prepared to work on anything. Among our clients, we have WordPress users, Joomla, and even a couple Compendium clients. No Movable Type blogs, but we’ll probably see some before too long.
