I think for quite awhile now the self-hosted version of WordPress has been considered by most to be the dominant blogging platform, but up until recently it was purely speculation.

Last Friday, Royal Pingdom did some research and published the top blogging platforms based upon the Technorati Top 100 list.  As you’d expect, WordPress took first place with 27 of the Top 100 blogs (5 more were hosted on WordPress.com).   Of the self-hosted blogs, Movable Type is in second place with 12 blogs.

For your reference, here are the 27 WordPress blogs (links are included on the original post):

• Perez Hilton
• Problogger
• Chris Brogan
• Zen Habits
• Copyblogger
• Think Progress
• VentureBeat
• SlashFilm
• Global Voices Online
• The Caucus Blog – NYTimes
• Bits Blog – NYTimes
• Freakonomics – NYTimes
• Pajamas Media
• Just Jared
• Smitten Kitchen
• Hot Air
• Neatorama
• TechCrunch
• Smashing Magazine
• Washington Wire – WSJ
• Michelle Malkin
• Daily Blog Tips
• Yanko Design
• Mashable
• Roy Tanck’s weblog
• CrunchGear
• Delicious:days

It is nice to see the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and New York Times (NY Times) both listed here.  It would be interesting if this study is done every year to see trends.   I would imagine WordPress will be over 50% of the Technorati Top 100 list within a few years as some of those blogs switch away from Typepad, move their WordPress.com blog to self-hosted, etc.

About a year ago when I restructured my online interests into a business (Apricot Media), one of the first things I set out to do was to take my existing websites/blogs and attempt to build them into mini networks or clusters of websites that could refer relevant traffic internally and then develop a brand between them.

Although WordPress Hacks is not my primary website, I have built a mini-network of websites within the WordPress niche and used branding to create user recognition.   If you look here at WP Hacks, WordPress eBook, WordPress Forums, and our WordPress Directory, you’ll see they all use blue and all use a very similar logo.   Over time people will associate a logo with your websites and eventually with you individually, which is the ultimate goal.  This will also drastically lower costs if you hire a designer, or save you time if you design things yourself.

If you’d like to see some very strong examples of internet blog brands built, check out this post over at Got Chance.   You’ll see Apricot Media featured there among some pretty elite company!

So, how does this all tie to WordPress?  I believe most, if not all of the sites mentioned, are built using WordPress.  Once you’ve built a completely custom theme you are happy with, you can easily install that theme on any number of other WordPress blogs and make the proper customizations (change the colors, adjust the logos, etc.) to grow and expand your brand.

When you build websites, how much time do you spend focusing on branding?

Blogging has been pretty mainstream for over five years now, but ever since Technorati released their recent State of the Blogosphere address, there has been a strong buzz around the blogosphere and the impending death of blogging.   This is primarily because of figures showing that about 200 million blogs have been created, but only 7.4 million have published a post in the past 4 months.   As this site loosely focuses on blogging, I wanted to share my thoughts and hear what some of your opinions are.

In my personal opinion, I don’t think that blogging is dying at all.  My belief is that to many people start a blog for the wrong reasons, or misunderstand the work and commitment associated with blogging.   I would say there are currently two primary reasons why most people start blogging:

1. Get Rich Quick – I’m not sure why this idea is out there, but there are a ton of people that believe that blogging will make your rich quick.   There are of course a number of people that have made a lot of money blogging, but most people who starting blogging now will need time to develop their blogging skills and develop readership before there are any monetary possibilities.
2. Personal Blog – This is closer in line with the original intention of blogging.   People launch a personal blog where they can talk about whatever they want.   Here are family pictures, these are my political opinions, and my favorite sports team won last night!   These types of blogs don’t have any focus that would appeal to a large group of people, so they lack readership, which in turn discourages the blogger from putting time into their hobby.

I also think the emergence of microblogging has had a strong influence on people leaving their blogs dormant.   Things like tumblelogs, Twitter and Facebook status updates have become very popular, negating what blogging offered to some people.   It’s much quicker and serves the same purpose for them.

What is the Future of Blogging?

This is always tough to gauge, so you kind of need to look at trends.

1. More User Interaction – The appeal of blogging has always been the interaction that is possible with the author and other readers, making the site a conversation station.   As bloggers continue to narrow their focus on smaller niches, the interaction seems to get better.  If you look at what WordPress is doing with their acquisitions, you can see how user interaction (improved comments, polls, BBPress, etc.) seems to be their focus for the future of their platform.
2. Rise in Video Blogging – What this method lacks with SEO (search engines can’t index what is said in a video), it makes up for in personalization.   Video posts can be created very quickly with mini-rants and I think readers enjoy video blog posts because they can actually see the author and hear the emotion in their voices.  These types of sites can develop a strong following very quickly and don’t rely much on search engines to bring them traffic.    Video blogging can also be integrated into a standard blog, giving people the best of both worlds.

I also believe we will continue to see fewer blogs in the traditional sense, meaning a standard website where the homepage displays a loop of the most recent posts.  More than likely some sort of hybrid will emerge over the next couple years, which is a cross between a Content Management System (CMS) and a blog.

What do you think?  What is the future of blogging?

I’m not really sure if this is a trend or just coincidence, but over the past week I’ve noticed quite a few of the blogs that I stumble upon require you to setup an account before you can leave a comment.  Anyone know what is up with that?

This is obviously a very useful WordPress feature for blogs that have a strong community built around their website, but I think most people should consider the consequences before they require you to register to comment.  A choice like this could keep truly hinder a new blogs growth or discourage a blogger who isn’t seeing the reader interaction they were hoping for.

As with pretty much everything, there are some positives and some negatives to doing this.  Off the top of my head, here are a few positives and negatives of requiring registration to leave a comment on a blog:

Positives of Registration

• Spam Prevention – Requiring registration should stop spam completely.
• More Options – Requiring registration opens up some interesting opportunities to customize comment appearance, allow you to create profiles, etc.   I’ve seen a few high profile websites do this, but the registration usually is optional instead of being required.

Negatives of Registration

• Less Comments – Some people value comments more than others, but I think most bloggers would find less comments to be a negative as the whole concept of blogging was formed around the concept of reader interaction with the writer.

I personally do not leave comments on blogs that require registration because it just isn’t worth it to me.  I have enough accounts to manage without trying to remember my account information.   I also think things like spam can easily be avoided for WordPress users using tools like Akismet and Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2, or Math Comment Spam Protection (which we use here).

I’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.   How do you feel about blogs that require registration to comment?   Do you take the time to register or do you just decide not to comment at all?

I know this isn’t WordPress related, but these are way to awesome not to mention.

Fast Icons is now offering free iPhone-like Web 2.0 icons representing the popular social networking companies.   I think they are incredible and will make good bookmarking icons on a WordPress blog.   I’m even considering using them for a theme I am building for one of my blogs.

Here is how a few of them look:

Thanks to Jeffro for the heads up on this!