2008 Year-End Wrap-Up

Another year, a few more blogs.

2008 has been a pretty groovy year for WordPress.com and the company behind it, Automattic. We doubled in size and brought new talent on board including some through the acquisition of two companies: Intense Debate and PollDaddy. This fine crew has helped bring new features to your dashboards, along with other goodies to be revealed in the new year. The growth has helped us to keep up with you guys in terms of service and new features.

Change

This year has been all about change — and, as always, listening to the WordPress community. We’ve introduced a ton of new features, some of which you’ve been asking for in the forums and comments: Snap previews, music and video uploads, identicons, captions, Turbo, sticky posts, HTTPS settings, polls, favicons, and lots more.

We also rolled out a few new themes: Monotone, Albeo, Journalist (revised), and DePo Masthead. That’s way too few though, and bringing more themes to you is going to be one of our top priorities for 2009.

Your dashboards have seen not one but two redesigns this year, and from the looks of your comments and other feedback, you’re pretty happy with the latest change. We’re glad, since this latest transformation will be the framework on which future features are built. (Also meaning we’re not planning to redesign again anytime soon!)

As is the case with any year, there were a couple rough days in 2008, but we survived a DOS attack or two with very minimal downtime, and learned a lot in the process that will have us better prepared in the future. We’re very proud to have been one of the most reliable online services this year with availability rivaling folks 100x our size.

Apps

The Open Source WordPress iPhone app was released earlier this year, and we’re now on our way to version 1.2. We’ve also partnered with LinkedIn by adding an app to their Applications feature, released through Open Social. Both of these are compatible with both WordPress.org and WordPress.com. (Don’t forget there’s also a Facebook application and a mobile site.)

Bloggers

We’ve spotlighted a number of new bloggers and WordPress converts this year over on our Publisher Blog. The breadth of talent and interests always amazes me. Folks from Martha Stewart to The Real Dan Lyons and organizations from the NFL to the UK Royal Navy use WordPress in all its flavors: WordPress.com, WordPress.com VIP, WordPress MU, and WordPress.org. More are being added to the Showcase every day.

WordCamps

The best representation of the WordPress community IRL is WordCamp. I’ve had a blast traveling the world and meeting you all at WordCamps this year. There were 29 WordCamps in all — from South Africa to Australia to Alabama — and I was able to attend and speak with you at about half. Attendance for all 2008 WordCamps combined was approximately 3,400, which is a number much higher than we could have drawn at just one big event in a single location per year. Thanks to all who organized WordCamps this year and helped bring the WordPress community together, worldwide.

Check out the list to see if there’s a WordCamp near you in 2009. If there isn’t, start your own! We’ll do what we can to help you make it happen.

Yearly Stats

Here are the stats in aggregate for the year!

2,906,086 blogs were created.
3,761,296 new users joined.
35,926,639 file uploads.
13.5 terabytes of new files.
4,804 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters. [corrected]
78,773,011 comments.
62,978,912 logins.
9,402,615,494 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 6,467,996,032 on self-hosted blogs (15.8 billion total across all WordPress blogs we track).
3,132,606 active blogs and 44,027,035 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.

Plus a bit on languages:

About 66% of blogs on WordPress.com are in English, but there’s also:

8% Spanish
5% Indonesian
4% Portuguese
2% Italian
2% German
2% French
1.5% Turkish
and another 9.5% of other languages.

It’s exciting to see WordPress.com become a truly global community, and we plan to keep that in mind as we move forward with features in 2009.

(If you want to improve the translations for your language and help contribute to WordPress, please add your entry to the WordPress Translation Project.)

Thanks

Lastly, from all of us at Automattic, thank you. By itself WordPress.com is just a blank canvas, it’s what you bring to it that draws the world to our doorsteps.

Happy New Year!

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