It was a gray winter morning in CMSland and here's how we decided to spend it: we packed down a block of fresh soda bread and headed over to Chez Technorati to have a gander at their 100 most linked-to (popular) blogs. With that list in hand we skipped about through viewed source, many emails and some kindly conversation. In the end we had ourselves a nifty little list consisting of website name and the blogging technology or Web CMS platform said site ran on.Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second, and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust.We enclose the full list here for your consideration, but first a couple of notes on the results.
Notes from the Field
WordPress wins -- it is used by a whopping 34 percent of the 100 blogs on Technorati's Top 100 linked-to.
Movable Type is used by 16 percent. So WP and MT between them provide the platform for half the surveyed blog sites.
This proportion would be higher, but for the amount of platforms which started out as either Movable Type or WordPress (usually MT, near as we can judge), only to be hacked beyond all recognition. These we classify as 'Custom'.
The "Big 2" blogging networks are neck and neck in terms of representation. Gawker has 8 blogs on the list, each using Gawker's own custom publishing platform (with a hacked Movable Type UI).The Weblogs network, also with 8 sites on the list, uses Blogsmith.
I'm not certain that Metafilter, Little Green Footballs, Crave|cnet and Daring Fireball are all categorized correctly. There could possibly be other gremlins lurking within this opus. Scornfully fill me in, if you know better.
Wider scope Web CMS technologies are not used much by the top blogs. Drupal scores 5 sites, with Plone used by 1. Other popular Web CMS platforms are conspicuous only by their absence.
Most of the custom systems built are legacy jobs used by websites for years (e.g., Drudge Report). No-one is crazy enough to build their own blogging platform these days...except maybe Gawker Media.
Judging by the list, the blogosphere is still at an immature stage. The list is dominated by gadgets, Web news, SEO, and general geekiness. Is that really all people want from a blog?
The Raw Numbers
Technorati Top 100 'Most Linked to' Blogs as of Jan, 2008 by publishing platform.
CMS/Platform
Count
WordPress
34
Movable Type
16
Custom CMS
11
Blogsmith/Weblogs
8
Gawker CMS
8
TypePad
7
Blogger/Blogspot
6
Drupal
5
Plone
1
Scoop
1
Expression Engine
1
Community Server
1
City Desk (Fog Creek)
1
And here's the full list of Technorati Top 100 Most Linked-to Blogs, as of 17 Jan 2008.
We do owe some thanks to everyone who tolerated our persistent pestering: people like Dennis at Techdirt and Maki at DoshDosh, in addition to the many names mentioned above. We have a particularly big thank you for Haochi of Googlefied, who had a list compiled of the top 75 popular blogs by platform, and was good enough to give us access to it. This saved me and my hamsters a nice block of time -- though not as much as it would have done had we stumbled into this man's lair a day earlier!