Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

Note that this article is about the Wordpress.com blogging service, not the Wordpress blog software (which is located at Wordpress.org.)

Wordpress.com growth before 2009

At the end of 2008, Wordpress.com hosted a bit over 5 million blogs, according to this graph below (showing the growth from the start in 2006 through 2008).

That the long-term growth for Wordpress.com is trending up is also clearly visible in the graph above. It looks a bit like a very even exponential curve (i.e. it’s not just growing, but the growth rate is increasing as well).

Estimating Wordpress.com growth in 2009

As the situation looks like now (see graph below), between 10,000 and 15,000 new blogs are added to Wordpress.com each day, so let’s say that on average 12,500 blogs are added to Wordpress.com on a daily basis.

Now, some people will delete blogs as well, and Automattic has a graph for this data as well, revealing that there are on average about 1,000 blogs deleted per day.

If we take these deletions into consideration, the Wordpress.com blogging service is growing with an average of about 11,500 blogs per day.

So, if we use this 11,500-per-day number as a starting point, how much would Wordpress.com grow in a year? The answer is: nearly 4.2 million. (365 x 11,500 = 4,197,500)

If Wordpress.com hosted a bit over 5 million blogs at the start of 2009, and if we take the increasing growth rate into consideration, it looks quite likely that Wordpress.com could pass 10 million hosted blogs by the end of 2009.

Making predictions like this will always remain speculation (we don’t have a crystal ball), but judging by the past and present growth of Wordpress.com it really does look like it could break the 10-million-blogs barrier before the end of 2009. Impressive. Looks like their servers will be kept busy…

The graphs are all from the Wordpress.com stats page, but we added our own notes (in red) to the daily growth and deletions graphs (which is pretty obvious).

Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.

Read more

Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

Read more

What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

Read more

We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

Read more

Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

Read more