Since missing out on the WordCamp Chicago event that took place a few months ago, I’ve been keeping an eye on upcoming WordCamp events in the hopes that one will happen here in the Midwest again.

If you’ve been considering going to one of these events, today I noticed a post from the official WordPress site listing the upcoming WordCamps, which can be viewed here.  For your reference, here are the events they list:

• WordCamp New Zealand: Wellington, New Zealand, August 8-9, 2009
• WordCamp Huntsville: Huntsville, Alabama, USA, August 15–16, 2009
• WordCamp Los Angeles: Los Angeles, California, USA, September 12, 2009
• WordCamp Philippines: Makati City, Philippines, September 19, 2009
• WordCamp Portland: Portland, Oregon, USA, September 19-20, 2009
• WordCamp Seattle: Seattle, Washington, USA, September 26, 2009
• WordCamp Birmingham: Birmingham, Alabama, USA, September 26-27, 2009
• WordCamp Netherlands: Utrecht, Netherlands, October 31, 2009
• WordCamp NYC: New York, New York, USA, November 14-15, 2009
• WordCamp Mexico: Mexico City, Mexico, November 20, 2009

It is good to see so many international WordCamps happening, as well as a few here in the United States.   If you are able to attend one of these events, I think most past WordCamp attendees would definitely recommend it.  I definitely am planning on attending the next one that takes place here in the Midwest.

As you might have already read, this past Saturday at WordCamp San Francisco Matt Mullenweg gave his annual “State of the Word” address, which is a much anticipated (at least by me) speech he has started giving yearly to cover the state of WordPress.

According to Matt, WordPress is has continued to show steady growth.    Here are the statistics he gave for WordPress.com:

• Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
• 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
• 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
• Two million new blogs created for the year
• 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)

As for WordPress.org users (which makes up most of this sites readers), it looks like there are 2.6 million active user-installed WordPress blogs.  These stats are based off of real data, so they should be pretty accurate.

Matt also commented on the future of WordPress, and their focus on building WordPress into a self-updating system.   This new process will be a one-click upgrade and will generate a list of incompatible WordPress plugins or WordPress themes (which will be made possible via the WordPress theme directory and plugin directory) and make upgrading a snap.

Overall, I’m very excited about the future of WordPress and think they are taking the right steps to continue growing and improving the software.  I think as long as they continue to integrate more of the most popular plugins into the core installation and add additional CMS functionality, Wordpress will continue to grow in popularity.