To blog or not to blog... That's not the question

As we plunge head first into the new year, us online inhabitants will inevitable take stock of our online habits. In the same way we way up the decision to switch toothpaste brand, or washing powder, our online domains often feel like they need a shake up. If you are like me then you may be feeling nostalgic about ning, or tired of twitter, or unmoved by MovableType, and feeling the need to refresh your blogging habits. But how in the vast wilderness that is the inter-web do we make a decision where to log our thoughts, feelings and news? Well this week some research from the good folks at Pingdom may be able to help that digital move. By using the Technorati Top 100, they weighed up which blogs used which services, and came up with some great insights...

I personally, as you can see use WordPress, (WordPress.com Hosted as I'm a cheapskate and refuse to pay yet more hosting fees...) However it seems I am not alone in this amongst the blogging elite, 5 of which use the service, however this sticks Wordpress.com blogs way down the list.

It seems far more of the powerbloggers and tweeters of the web use self-hosted WordPress based sites, which is logical for the amount of traffic and content that they host, and due to many being liked to corporate sites. A good point from Ian @technorati illustrates this - 

"We don’t publish stats about it officially but the numbers skew even more strongly towards WordPress as you expand down the long tail. Not a diss on WordPress but I suspect the number of hosting services that support WordPress (and in general support PHP+MySQL) accounts for much of the popularity; folks will opt for whatever is easiest on their ISP arrangement."

It seems to me that there is no bearing on how popular a blog is due to which service or platform it uses, and that i suppose is the key point. For those of us that trawl the blogosphere day in day out, we are looking for great content, ideas, passions and nuances. Things that sup rise and engage, and hopefully sometimes shock. But there definitely is something to be said for aesthetics, usability and ease on the eye. No-one wants to feel like they are having their frontal cortex gouged out with a blunt spoon just to read about another twitter application, regardless of how cute or clever it is.