Analysis of blog platforms used by top 2500 blogs

March 24, 2009 Brian Mackie 5 Comments

In follow-up to the previous post, we thought it might be interesting to see what blog platforms are most used by the Web’s blogging elite.  So we took the top 2500 blogs from the UGC Metabase and checked their <generator> tag, which (when present) tells you what blog software the author’s using.  The results are compiled in the chart below.

A few notes regarding the data:

- The top 2500 blogs is based on the number of inbound links found in posts from other blogs over a 6 month rolling period, across a total index of ~250,000 blogs. This ranking feature is still quite fresh and a little coarse, but nonetheless we think it should provide for a valid aggregate view.

- There’s a noticeable lack of LiveJournal blogs in the top 2500, in fact we only counted 1. We’ll re-run this list in time and see if more start to come through. That said, seems none of Technorati’s top 100 blogs are published through LiveJournal so perhaps it’s just not a platform of choice amongst top bloggers.

- WordPress dominates, followed by Blogger, then TypePad/Movable Type.

- There’s no shortage of blog platforms out there, in total we counted 45.

- There are 509 feeds where we did not detect a <generator> tag.  At the moment we haven’t looked into this further, if we gain any insight down the line we’ll update accordingly.

 Some of the platforms included under ‘Other’:  Community Server (18), FeedCreator (8), Nucleus CMS (7), Over Blog (6), Canal Blog (5), Subtext (3), Expression Engine (3), FeedForAll (3), Newtelligence (3), Subtext (3), vBulletin (3), Tumblr (3), Dotclear (2), GeekLog (2), Joomla (2), PidoLand (2), Reinvented Software (2), Serendipity (2), SkunkWeb (2), Text Pattern (2), WebMonkey (2), Yahoo Pipes (2), b2evolution (1), Blog Spirit (1), Blogware (1), Lemonz Dream (1), Liberated Syndication (1), LiveJournal (1), Microsoft Spaces (1). Radio Userland (1), Podomatic (1), Wordzilla (1), plus a few more.

Though we wont be working from a static dataset, it might be interesting to re-visit this in some months time and see if any trends are apparent – never know, maybe one of the smaller platforms will come through with some killer feature and eclipse them all! …  (no, we don’t know what that would be either).

Filed under: aggregation,blogs analysis,social media