The number of blogs on WordPress.com passed 2 million late last night. I think that’s just amazing and wonderful!
Links …
- Frank asks for the facts behind the cocaine deaths in Ireland recently. I wondered what the odds of dying from cocaine are. Is it really as low as between 0.1% and 1%? How does that compare to road deaths?
- Can you heat a room with a 100w bulb? Sounds too good to be true …
- Dickie Rock looks scary!
- Red Mum found a Far Too Much Bertie sticker. Haven’t seen any myself but I haven’t been in town in ages.
- 2 million blogs. That’s quite a community. The next social network could be WordPress. Looks like I’m not the only one who’d rather be blogging!
In contrast to social networking, blogging offers a person-centric way for individuals to come online. A social network like Facebook gives you your own place online, but it’s not really your own place. As Copyblogger Brian Clark recently said in a blog post, “For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating ‘user-generated’ content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.”
Clark was responding to an ongoing conversation launched by blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who proposed that blogging is far more important to him than social networking. Bloggers including Stowe Boyd and Darren Rowse seconded the idea. This growing disenchantment with social networking and return to blogging suggests that in the future we could see a migration, at least among tech bloggers, towards more distributed social networking — along the lines of what Messina envisions.
- Gavin complained that he couldn’t copy/paste the Mahon Tribunal transcripts. I was able to do just that using Gnome app Evince. Here’s day 328. Anyone want to help copy them into a DRM free format? Our tax payers money paid for them after all.
Now that’s a whole lot of blogs, and a great testament to the power and quality of WordPress, and the hosting setup on wordpress.com!
It’d be interesting to know how many of those 2 million are actually active (say, at least one post in the last month or two).
Do you have stats for activity Donncha? Not trying to minimise the achievement or anything, but 2m blogs is the same as the claimed 130k Boards users; i.e. the stat doesn’t really count for much without activity stats. (In my experience, on average the number of users V active users in vbulletin is 4:1, however that’s on a board that’s regularly purged of never-activated accounts, historical 0-post accounts, etc. On a non-purged board it’s probably closer to 8:1 or higher.)
Am activity graph would be intesting.
adam
Take a look at http://wordpress.com/stats/
Somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 posts made every day is fairly healthy!
Hey Donncha, that anecdotal figure of 0.1% to 1% is from a doctor and is only in relation to people who dabble with cocaine.. I’m guessing what he means is that figure is to do with sudden death in those who try cocaine but are not regular users.
But yes, real figures would be nice…
In regards to the DRM-protected PDFs, I’d suggest someone just wget all the PDF files and write a quick script that passes them through some of the tools that come with Ghostscript. I wrote about doing that a while back. A brief overview:
That’s pretty easy, eh?
Please pass my congratulations on to the entire team. 2M blogs is quite an achievement.
John