WordPress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic built on top the world-famous WordPress software, is about to hit another major milestone: 20 million hosted blogs.

Now on to the insane part: Tumblr, which has to be considered a relative newcomer on the blogging scene, has now almost caught up with WordPress.com. The difference between the two is currently just 1.5 million blogs, and that is shrinking fast.

That is all the more impressive when you consider that things are going great for WordPress.com. Automattic’s service hosts twice as many blogs now compared with the same time last year. Going from 10 to 20 million blogs in a year is awesome work, but Tumblr is just growing like crazy.

The past five months for WordPress.com and Tumblr

Here’s how things looked like back in December of 2010:

Compare that with the situation today (May 10, 2011):

WordPress.com is still ahead, but Tumblr is right at its heels. In the same amount of time, Tumblr has grown almost 2x as much as WordPress.com (absolute growth, not relative). As we said, impressive.

Final words

WordPress was started in 2005, Tumblr in 2007. Despite that two-year head start for WordPress.com, the two services will soon be on an equal footing in terms of the number of blogs they host. It also looks like Tumblr’s momentum will carry it past WordPress.com within the next couple of months.

We suspect that part of the explanation for Tumblr’s rapid growth is its different approach to blogging, using a model very suitable for microblogging or lifestreaming, while WordPress.com is more old school, targeted at “traditional” blogging. Tumblr may simply have a wider appeal.

The big challenge for Tumblr hasn’t been to grow, but to grow gracefully. There have been significant growing pains while they have tried to scale the service to meet demand. This culminated late last year but has since improved, although our monitoring (via the Pingdom uptime monitoring service) shows that Tumblr still has occasional issues handling the massive, and continuous, increase in traffic.

That said, big congratulations to both services are in order. Both teams are bound to be working their collective rear ends off. Running a fast-growing service at this scale is challenging work.

Data sources: Tumblr and WordPress.com (Automattic).

Perceptions matter, and the perception of Nokia in the news, on the web, and in the minds of many, is that things aren’t going that well. Even in the Pingdom office, we hear “Nokia is doomed,” but do the numbers support this belief?

Looking at the statistics, Symbian leads the mobile operating system race with just over 30% of web browsing traffic. That’s down slightly from late last year, when we noted that Symbian finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system, with almost 34% of the mobile OS market.

What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

Read more

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we talk mainly about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Some fresh research shows an increase in smaller, more targeted DDoS attacks, and hacker group Anonymous has vowed to take down the Internet by launching a DDoS attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

Read more

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on OpenStack.

Read more

By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many are added each day, each week, or each minute? We think we have a pretty good idea.

Read on for some pretty amazing numbers.

Read more

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we can finally talk about Saleh’s Carbon for Windows Phone app being available in Windows Marketplace. We also talk to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC.com about the world of supercomputers.

Read more