The growth of the microblogging platform Tumblr has been nothing short of amazing. The increase in users and overall attention the service is getting is reminiscent of when Twitter took off. There are now almost 28 million blogs on Tumblr. A year ago there were seven million.

As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Tumblr users will soon have cranked out a whopping 10 billion posts. That’s a huge milestone for Tumblr. At the current rate of more than 37 million posts per day, this should happen in about a week.

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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.

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Not a week goes by without news about Twitter, the popular microblogging and social networking site. Things like how companies use Twitter for marketing, how consumers use it to flex their muscles, and how celebrities… well, use it to be celebrities.

While Twitter has a huge user base, it isn’t the only microblogging service on the Web. One of Twitter’s competitors that you should pay attention to is identi.ca. It combines the best, and occasionally the worst, of the microblogging and open source worlds.

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Twitter’s meteoric rise to fame has been hard to miss, especially after it really took off in 2009. The latest number being thrown around is that the service will soon have 18 million users in the United States alone.

We all know that Twitter is extremely popular in the United States, but it’s pretty darn popular in the rest of the world as well (Pingdom is on Twitter, and we’re Swedes!) But it took Twitter a while to get there.

Let’s take a tour of the geographic expansion of Twitter from its launch in 2006 until today in 2009.

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We have entered a new era when it’s easier than ever before to get your opinion out there. Writing a short message on Twitter takes almost no effort at all and it is immediately published on the Web. Services like Twitter have amplified the word-of-mouth effect several times over.

For an extreme example, just check out the talk on Twitter when Gmail is down.

There is a parallel here to blogging. What regular blogging once did for word of mouth was to make it possible for anyone to become a publisher (going from “one-to-one” to “one-to-many” communication). This has now been taken one step further since even those reluctant to maintain a blog won’t think twice about sending out a quick message on Twitter or any other micro-blogging service.

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Digg had an outage today that was most likely the result of the ongoing migration of Digg’s servers to a new data center.

That didn’t stop people from wondering what was going on when the site went offline, as you could see for example on Twitter.

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