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Blog Research: Wordpress vs. Blogger
By maurizio | July 3, 2007
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As I said yesterday, I am “developing” (it’s probably better to say “filling”) a Database of sites for research purposes.
Right now I have 112,119 sites. (yesterday I said 160,000..my fault).
My first idea was to find out how many bloggers use WordPress and how many use Blogger.
The easiest way that came to my mind was to look for an HTML tag that most WordPress blogs should use:
<meta name='generator' content='XXXX'>
Where XXX should be the name of the blogging software.
Running my search on those 112k sites gave me the following results:
- 15816 have the meta generator tag
- 7070 Blogger sites (meta generator=blogger)
- 5685 Wordpress sites (meta generator contains the word “WordPress” )
- 1563 typepad
- 460 movabletype
- 168 Blogspirit
- 159 canalblog
As you can see, most of the sites (on my Db) have the meta tag generator set to Blogger. This doesn’t mean that there are more Blogger than WordPress blogs, because there are a lot of WordPress users that remove meta tags. If I can’t find the tag the site will not appear on that list. Of course there could be other way to discover if a site is using WordPress or not. I am actually developing a better way (but slower) to discover WordPress blogs. I hope to be able to post my new results soon.
I am also adding new sites to my Database, so maybe in the future I’ll need more than a week to get the information I need.
If you want to see the complete list of meta generator tags let me know and I’ll post it.
Topics: Content Creation |
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July 3rd, 2007 at 7:08 am
[...] You can read it here : Blog Research. [...]
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:31 am
I don’t know if any other information exists that you could use to verify which software is being used other than the obvious. Obvious would be wordpress.com and blogspot.com domains. “Powered by WordPress” would be something you could scrape from a lot of newer blogs (even mine).
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:42 am
The Powered by will probably be one of the things I’ll look for.
I was thinking about something more subtle, like looking for the page /wp-admin , which shouldn’t be a 404.
July 4th, 2007 at 2:28 am
Hi Maurizio,
Thanks for the message. I was surprised to see the percentages between Blogger and Wordpress so even, as you know, in my short survey it was about 3.5:1 in favour of Wordpress. I just opened up the source code and had a look to see what I could find. I will get in touch later. Vic
July 4th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
[...] You can read my first results on the post where I look for the most used blogging software: Blogger or Wordpress. If you find this kind of information useful, please send me something else I have to search. Note [...]
July 5th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Hi, an interesting post, but what’s most interesting is yet to come. Please keep us updated with the results. I’m particularly interested in this.
July 5th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Both Stumbled and Dugg :) !
July 8th, 2007 at 9:12 am
[...] is an excellent blog on the subject of blogging. The author, Maurizio from somewhere in the US, is doing a fascinating project compiling a database of WordPress and Blogger blogs with a custom-built Java application. At the [...]
July 9th, 2007 at 9:35 am
[...] Blog Research: Wordpress vs. Blogger [...]
August 7th, 2007 at 10:31 am
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October 8th, 2007 at 4:09 am
hi.i saw you on the mybloglog community.I am presently using blogger for my blog- actually, i am new in this area.i just got interested in blogging when my cousin told me to try. Anyway,i was able to buy a domain but do not know how to proceed with it.can you help me? thanks