WordPress – both in its hosted and self-hosted forms – has long been among the most popular platforms for personal and professional blogs (and it’s what we use here at TechCrunch, too). Looking at the top 100 blogs in Technorati’s index, a new study by website monitoring firm Pingdom found that 49% of the top 100 blogs now use WordPress. That’s up from 32% in 2009. No other platform even comes close.

Typepad was still the second most popular platform in 2009, but now it has virtually disappeared from the rankings. Movable Type, which was still being used by 12 of top 100 blogs in 2009, is now down to 7.

Trend: Secrecy and Custom Platforms

Interestingly, this has also given rise to a new degree of secrecy. Pingdom, for example, was unable to determine which platforms some of the top 100 sites use and was even told by one site administrator that he “was under non-disclosure agreement to not reveal anything about the site.”

Although I think you’re better off not hosting your hot, hot beta launch screen yourself, if you simply must have complete control there’s LaunchEffect, a WordPress theme that recreates the complex process of asking for – and storing – email addresses of wannabe beta users.

The system supports three basic functions:

You can then track the most excited folks – the folks who referred the most people – and give them a special prize like a beta account, a goldfish, or a bag of onions.

LaunchEffect is free but a premium version adds an animated countdown, a more brandable experience, and a more formal blog layout. You can check out a demo of the premium version here. The premium version costs $35 for a single-site license.

Again, some folks like to have complete control and some like to cede a little control for proven performance. Either way, it’s a fun way to build a buzz.

WooThemes has just announced a new theme for musicians called Unsigned. To build the theme, the company worked with band managers and promoters as well as real, actual musicians in order to make a “rockin’” theme that is both “classical” and “jazzy” with a little but of “afro-beat” thrown in.

The theme includes modules for events, discographies, and SoundCloud comparability for uploading music. You can also use a sales widget to sell music and merch instantly. The theme supports “tours” and events separately, so you can plan your cross-country van trip and your tour of the Baltic states using the same system.

Sure you could use services like Bandcamp but this offers a bit more customization, allowing musicians to “riff” with their designs while “playing a mean licorice stick” in the CSS.

Most important it gives musicians quite a bit of control over their online presence and because it’s a WordPress solution service providers can offer a one-stop-shop for up-and-coming bands. Now they just need a way for the site to split up into multiple sites when the bassist sleeps with the singer and breaks up the band and the drummer wants to do some solo trance work.

Here’s the full feature list for your edification:

You can check it out here and get a 12% discount on the them until February 2 with the coupon code UNSIGNED12.

Appifier is a new service, previously in beta, that turns WordPress sites into mobile apps. That’s not mobile websites, mind you, but actual mobile applications complete with push notifications, offline access, Twitter and Facebook sharing, plus a native look, feel and speed.

Unlike many DIY app creators (and there are many), Appifier isn’t doing a freemium offering. You can test out your app for free, but if you want to publish it in the app store, there are fees involved.

For non-coders/developers, the fees are reasonable. You can pay-as-you-go for $39.99 per month or you can bite the bullet and pay the “lifetime” fee of $499.99. The plans include same day iTunes App Store submission, unlimited push notifications, social media sharing features, custom design and branding, and analytics.

Says Co-founder Mike Gozzo (from his home office in Montreal), he and fellow Co-founder Steve Panetta, think they have something unique because other WordPress app builders don’t help you get into the app store and/or don’t create native apps. Think WPTouch, for example – the hugely popular WordPress plugin for turning a WordPress site into a mobile site. Or Weever Apps, another well-known option. But, says Gozzo, designers aren’t able to resell these creations as mobile apps. So the goal is to create a service they – or anyone – could use to build something a bit more elegant and packaged.

While it’s true that Appifier may stand out among the WordPress-to-app builder crowd, it isn’t just competing with them  -  it’s competing with all mobile app builders. And there are a lot of them out there. I mean, a lot. A year ago, I started making a spreadsheet (Google Docs link – and no you cannot edit it) to track all the services I could find, but had to stop around 55. That’s a crowded market. But the mobile app ecosystem is incredibly large, too, and growing still.

Appifier is at least focusing on a very popular vertical: WordPress and non-developers. In addition, the app-building process is short: 60 seconds the company claims. (See the video below).

Although there aren’t apps in the iTunes App Store yet (the service is launching today), there are a few in the Appifier Sandbox I could test. This is where potential customers will try-before-they-buy, too. Apps run a little slower in the Sandbox than they would natively, but you get the idea.

The apps are simple, with buttons for posts, categories and search, but they’re a heck of a lot prettier than WPTouch websites thanks to support for images, themes and other customizations. (It supports ads, too, if you must). Appifier will upgrade these customization options soon, in order to give designers even more control over the UI (user interface). All existing users will be upgraded for free.

And because the apps are native, the plan is to add support for more native features in the next update – like geolocation and text-to-speech, for example.

If you want to check out Appifier for yourself, you can test it out for free from here.

After 14 million downloads of WordPress 3.2, WordPress 3.3 is being released to the wild today. Codenamed “Sonny” in honor of the jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, WordPress 3.3 is available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard.

WordPress, which had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, has a number of new features and bells and whistles, including UI improvements. The new version includes a revamped welcome screen and improved contextual help UI.

The media uploader has also been streamlined with a drag-and-drop image uploader. A new menu feature allows users to hover over menus for navigation. There is a new toolbar, and improved co-editing notifications and support. And WordPress 3.3 now comes with a Tumblr importer and is optimized for the iPad.

For developers, WordPress has also released a new editor API, new jQuery version, better ways to hook into the help screens, improvements on the Codex and more.

Automattic has teamed up with Federated Media to – finally – allow WordPress.com bloggers to make money from online advertising. The project is called WordAds and if you’re on WordPress.com you can express your interest for the program here.

From the WordPress.com blog, including a fair bit of snark directed at Google:

Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads.

We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad.

You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.

WordAds, which is optional, will let bloggers make money from their blogs by showing “high quality ads from brand advertisers” – this is where Federated Media will come in.

Note that not every WordPress.com blog will be eligible for the program. According to the sign-up page, only publicly visible blogs with custom domains will be considered. Furthermore, selection will be based on “level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog”.

Automattic’s Jon Burke also threw out an interesting stat in the blog post: apparently, more than 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs come online on a daily basis.

Can’t get enough of that Facebook Timeline? Want to copy it wholesale in your own WordPress blog? Do you want to support an “Italian boy” named Julian? I bet you do.

We just got this excellent tip from Julian describing the process by which he created this very own theme, the aptly-named “Timeline-wp.” He wants no beef with Facebook and, while I find the adoption of an established megacompany’s brand and image slightly unbecoming and/or dangerous even for a private blog (and a bit shortsighted as Facebook will probably tear this design up by the time the next f8 rolls around), you can download and install the theme today at no cost to you.

My name is Julian, I’m a Italian boy, a freelance web designer.

I attended the conference and after seeing the new profile page, I lost time has been the theme I developed thanks to the power of WordPress.

My mission is to understand how powerful wordpress, many think it is a CMS only for blogs, but it is not.

I had actually thought about creating a paid version, but I think will be only free for to experiment and study the layout and the CMS.

I do not want to have problems with copy Facebook =D

I’m trying to contact Marc or marketing area to try to make me give a green light to release the theme.

I am very happy to have been mentioned on several blogs in spain, france and england, this is enough for me.

In all honesty, Julian is quite earnest and charming in his pitch and I’m more than willing to share his good news with you all. After all, how do we learn if not by copying the masters. Julian, you see, is standing on the shoulders of giants and some day, maybe, this copy will net him an interview with Facebook where they all laugh heartily at his youthful shenanigans and then hire him to run a bank of servers.

A few weeks ago, we heard that the San Francisco Port Authority had red-tagged Pier 38 — putting up warnings that the space was unsafe. This is a big deal because Pier 38 is something of a tech hub. It’s home to tenants including Dogpatch Labs, Polaris Ventures, Automattic, True Ventures, 99 Designs, EGG HAUS, and more.

While Robert Scoble grabbed some pictures showing just how serious these notices were — it’s never good to see a big red sign with the word “UNSAFE” on the door to your business — Polaris’ Ryan Spoon downplayed the warnings. Here’s what he said to us at the time:

Over the last few days, Pier 38 has undergone a management change (we have always been sub-tenants). The City of San Francisco has notified Pier 38 building management of specific code violations. We are in close contact with building management and the port authority – and we have been informed that normal operations should continue at this time. Meanwhile, the pier is as vibrant and active as ever: home to Dogpatch Labs, Polaris Ventures, Automattic, True Ventures, 99 Designs and many more. We’re working to better understand what the management change and ports plans mean for us all.

Fast forward to last week. The Port Authority put up new signs indicating that all tenants had to vacate the property within 30 days. But some tenants were trying to negotiate ways to extend this window, and there was hope they could do that. But today, after a meeting between the Port Authority and the Pier 38 tenants, that hope has died. Everyone must be out by September 30.

Again, this is awful news for the tech community that has thrived in the space which resides right on the water in the city. An important part of WordPress operates out of here. And the Dogpatch space Polaris set up gave a first home to startups like Instagram.

Reached for comment, Spoon confirms the decision today and writes:

The Port Authority of San Francisco notified all Pier 38 tenants, including us, that we must move out by September 30th. This is obviously unfortunate for the Pier and for the Dogpatch Labs – which has hosted over 250 entrepreneurs and 100+ companies like Instagram, Formspring, TaskRabbit, Recurly, Yardsellr, LOLapps, Appjet, etc. In total, these companies have raised over $100m in seed and venture funding. We are actively working on finding a great new Dogpatch Labs home and hope to be settled and taking applications by end of Q3.

Blogging software WordPress is announcing a number of impressive growth stats today. WordPress is now powering 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%. And 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress. These stats apply to both WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites.

You can also check out Founder Matt Mullenweg’s ‘State of the Word’ adress at WordCamp San Francisco last week. In July, WordPress.com blogs passed the 50 million mark. At the time, WordPress revealed that each month, 287 million people account for 2.5 billion pageviews on WordPress.com blogs.

In his speech, Mullenweg says that WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and has seen 200 million plugin downloads. WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade speed in the blogging platform’s history.

Today, WordPress is also releasing the findings of a user and developer survey, which got over 18,000 responses from users around the world. Mullenweg says that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50.

In a blog post on the WordPress.com blog, Automattic‘s Justin Shreve this morning acknowledged his employer’s aspirations to turn WordPress.com into more of a platform than a mere Web-based blogging software service.

The company has added support for authentication protocol OAuth 2 to WordPress.com and is debuting a brand new developer portal.

Starting today, WordPress.com supports OAuth 2, an open authentication protocol that basically makes it easier for third party apps to connect with WordPress.com blogs through secure API authorization. That means developers can configure their applications to be able to access a WordPress.com blog without ever asking for personal details such as a password or username.

However, somewhat hidden on the contact page of the new developer portal you’ll find that OAuth2 client access will be granted only on a limited basis for the time being.

The only app using it today appears to be Memolane.

The developer portal contains documents and resources aimed to help developers use WordPress.com technologies to build applications. The portal is fairly sparse t this point, but Automattic says it will be adding more resources and tools as its developer ecosystem grows.

Why are so many people downloading the latest iteration? According to Matt Mullenweg and company, the goal for WordPress 3.2 was “lighter and faster”, meaning that Gershwin makes a play at removing extra code, rewriting certain queries for speed optimization, etc.

User interface has also seen a little bit of tweaking in the new version, as you can see from the comparison between versions 3.1 (left) and 3.2 below:

Another cool feature of v3.2 is what WordPress is calling “Distraction Free Writing” (DFW), which replaces “Full Screen” mode, with a new mode that has the dashboard fade into the background while the user writes to offer a less cluttered viewing experience. The team has also been referring to this as “zen mode”, and apparently users are feeling the power of the zen:

According to Mullenweg, beyond an attempt to make the entire WordPress experience faster and adding a few tweaks to admin design, the team has also updated the default theme to be compatible with micro-blogging, HTML5 and to work on any screen size. All much needed enhancements. (For full disclosure, TechCrunch runs on WordPress.)

This is WordPress’s 15th major release, and the website platform now boasts over 15,000 plugins. What’s more, WordPress 3.2 will not be compatible with Internet Explorer 6, something that Microsoft actually seems quite happy about.

Contributors to WordPress will also now be given credit in a “Credits Screen”, so that finallycredit may be given where credit is due, especially for all those that have participated in the open source development of the 15 WordPress iterations and counting.

For a full rundown of all the new updates to Gershwin, check them out here.

The latest stable version of WordPress, 3.1, was first released on 23 February 2011.

Now, less than 5 months later, the blogging software has been downloaded over 15 million times according to a tweet posted mere minutes ago (and the download counter).

Joomla just recently announced that its software has been downloaded 23 million times (note that this is the total number, not for any specific versions of the software solution).

For your information: WordPress 3.1 is what TechCrunch uses to power most of its sites.

The latest version of the popular blogging software product is actually WordPress 3.1.4, which is a maintenance and security update for all previous versions.

Just yesterday, a blog post about the next version, WordPress 3.2, was published, revealing that it will be released ‘very soon’ (release candidate here).

WordPress 3.2 will finally drop support for Internet Explorer 6.

Related: Automattic Hits 300 Million Unique Visitors, Roughly $10M In Revenue

Many are likely most familiar with WordPress, which TechCrunch has covered quite a bit (and uses to power most its sites, for full disclosure). WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Web, running 62 percent of the top million websites that use a CMS, according to BuiltWith, with Joomla now ranking second at 10 percent and closing.

There are a ton of these content management systems out there, even though the top 3 claim most of the market share. And, as BuiltWith’s roster shows, microblogging and blog publishing services are often grouped in with CMSes — as some are able to be customized into a CMS — even though their scopes tend to be far more specialized. Services like Blogger and Tumblr, to name two, are sometimes lumped in with CMSes and have attracted a lot of coverage in the press, some of which is for good reason.

Because of this, services like Joomla seem to fly a bit under the radar. Or, at least so it seems with Joomla in particular, which has yet to be covered by TechCrunch. (Or has, at least, been covered minimally compared to 63 posts for WordPress.)

So what is this “Joomla”, and why should you care about it? Joomla is a free, open source CMS, written in PHP that uses object-oriented programming, storing data in a MySQL database, and does page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search — things that every CMS should do.

And there are these impressive statistics: Joomla has now passed 23 million downloads, and currently stands at just over 23.5 million, to be precise. It owns 10.3 percent of the CMS market share, and BuiltWith shows it’s powering over 1.4 million websites. Joomla, for one, says that it’s impossible to know for sure, but estimates last year by FinishJoomla put that number between 1.5 and 2 million. Which admittedly seems small compared to the 23 million downloads.

Pure statistics are fine and dandy, but what’s led Joomla to become the second largest CMS on the Interwebs? This is an especially interesting question considering that, as an open source system, there is no figurehead or CEO pulling the strings, or making product decisions. Joomla is updated and expanded on, like WordPress(.org) and Drupal, by its community of developers.

But unlike Matt Mullenweg of WordPress (who, incidentally, was named one of the 50 most important people on the Web by PC Magazine) there is no “face” of Joomla; instead, it has been collectively run by the nearly 250K developers that use Joomlacode.org, the resource in which developers can build open source software projects, tools and extensions, for Joomla users. (And there are currently nearly 8K extensions available for the Joomla platform.)

Unlike, say Mullenweg’s Automattic, Joomla is lead by three leadership teams, including OpenSourceMatters.org, a non-profit entity that provides organizational, legal, and financial support to the Joomla community. A goal of these leadership teams are to maintain Joomla’s open source nature, assuring that Joomla is a project that acts autonomously, is socially responsible, and remains accountable to its community.

According to Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, the Joomla community has evolved significantly over the last 5 years, and in January of this year, Joomla’s Production Leadership Team initiated some changes to the project’s release cycle, that have already begun contributing to Joomla’s growth.

Namely, the project has moved away from a feature-based lifecycle to a time-based lifecycle, which means that Joomla now releases a new version of its platform every 6 months. Instead of having the lead developers writing the code behind each sporadic release of new features, Joomla allows the community of developers to make patches, fix bugs, tinker with the framework or the design for the end-user. Then, at the end of the 6 months, the Production Leadership Team merges everything together into a finished release, which is then distributed to the public.

Version 1.6, which was released in January, has been downloaded over 2.5 million times in the last 3.5 months, according to Ozimek, with 220 users now joining Joomla forums every single day.

Compared to Drupal, Joomla has traditionally been focused on smaller companies, novices, and those who aren’t necessarily experienced developers, whereas the other has gone after enterprises and has a greater array of lumber and plumbing for heavier use cases. Drupal (and for full disclosure, I run a website using Drupal) also comes with a fairly steep learning curve. It’s not so easy to use right out of the box.

Once you’ve created custom fields, content types — in other words, dug into and played around with it for awhile — Drupal begins to shine. So, Joomla’s strength in comparison is really that it’s ready to use; it requires no hardware investments or spending on software, and it works with a wide variety of SQL and noSQL databases.

Again, for a CMS that has nearly 24 million downloads, 10 percent market share, and 500K registered users in its forums, Joomla is relatively unheard of in the U.S. Another reason for this (and another one of its strengths) is that, since its inception, the service has been geared towards an international audience. Joomla is currently being used in over 200 countries, according to Ozimek, with more than 2,500 international government agencies using the service to run those websites. (NASA, the US Air Force and US Army, included.)

What’s more, Joomla has never taken in outside investment. Ozimek said that nearly 100 percent of the revenue for the non-profit has come from Google AdWords, or other advertising services, used across its network of websites — or from sponsorship.

Both in its open source nature, bootstrapped financing, international focus, and use among “the little guys”, Ozimek said, chuckling, Joomla has taken on somewhat of a “hippie vibe”. And, speaking like a true long-hair-type, when asked how he compares Joomla’s progress to that of its nominal competitors, Ozimek said that the goal is not grabbing market share from other platforms, the goal is showcasing the capabilities of open source communities and software. “Our competition is proprietary software”, he said. “We want to work towards a time when we’re all open coding”. What a hippie.

Following in the footsteps of commenting systems Echo, Disqus and Intense Debate, WordPress.com has launched WordPress, Twitter and Facebook authorization and identity systems for its own commenting platform, in that order. The blog host didn’t even have the WordPress.com option before.

Coming before Facebook on this is another albeit small win for Twitter, who yesterday became the first social platform to be fully integrated into an iOS.

Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg tells me that the Twitter and Facebook comments are a lot more “flexible” than just Twitter and Facebook, and that we also should probably consider them here at TC. (Check in on this post in an hour or two for statistics what is being most used.)

While the new WordPress.com commenting box allows you to post as your WordPress.com account, a guest or as your Twitter and Facebook profile, the platform conveniently allows you to stay logged in to multiple identity systems at once.

WordPress.com currently serves 18 million sites, including VIPs GigaOm, CNN and Time and of course TechCrunch.

On top of this, and much to the chagrin of the video-on-demand watching public, Netflix went down for what seemed like a century. I subscribe to Netflix Instant, and as you can see from the message above, I was not allowed to watch my “programs” this evening when I wanted to. Not cool, Netflix. Not cool.

Those trying to access Netflix mobile were also shut out from using the service. Some iPad users received an error message that read, “The requested URL /WiHome was not found on this server”.

Ironically, this outage occurred a few hours after Netflix stock was upgraded to “outperform” thanks to some audacious Credit Suisse analyst, “who lifted the stock price target to $280″. Very audacious indeed. CNBC crazy man Jim Cramer agrees, saying today that he thinks Netflix is worth twice its current price. Netflix stock price hit an all-time high of $247.55 last month, and today rose 4.2 percent, to $221.88 in late trading.

What’s more, the service now boasts over 20 million subscribers and a Sandvine study showed that the service has become the largest source of U.S. Internet traffic during peak Web-surfing hours. Yes, it seems that Netflix could break the Internet — that is, of course, if the Internet doesn’t break Netflix first.

Naturally, the Web has been a-flutter with Netflix related chatter, with many of its subscribers taking to Twitter to express their frustration, like this Tweet from one Paula Simone:

“dammit! netflix isn’t working. I had to put my dvd of arrested development in the xbox by hand! BY HAND! what is this 2009?”

Of course, one Twitter user sees a silver lining for the video hub, “Netflix’s current outage and the complaints about [it] in Twitter show how integral it’s become to entertainment for the tech generation”.

Subscribers even created a Yahoo Answers thread, so you know it’s bad.

Netflix publicly recognized the outage in its own Twitter post around 4p.m. PST, but has yet to explain the cause of the outage or project a timeline for when the service might be available again. Netflix spokesman Steven Swasey said he did not yet have any details on what caused the problem.

Amazon, which has been trying to compete with Netflix in on-demand-video (and launched its instant video streaming service last month but has been forced to watch the big red video service deliver 61 percent of the Web’s total digital video. Amazon currently only offers about 5,000 titles, compared to Netflix’s 20,000+, so the eCommerce giant is likely very pleased with what transpired today, and may very well be massaging its hands and whispering “eexcellent” a la Mr. Burns.

The outage today presumably just goes to show that Netflix will have to invest more in its data centers and servers to make sure the streaming option remains available, because users likely won’t stand for these kind of interruptions much longer. Pitchforks and torches are on the horizon.

In the past, Netflix has offered credit to its subscribers following large-scale outages. It remains to be seen whether it remained down for long enough to call for such compensation, but from what I saw on Twitter, many were suffering serious abandonment issues. Some were even forced to exercise instead of watching on-demand video. I know. God help us all.

Update: As of 7:30pm, my Netflix is back up, but no official word from the company as of yet.

Update 2: We experienced some WordPress issues earlier today and, as a result, an early iteration of this post was published. Updates have been made and problems fixed. Specifically in regard to Netflix’s current stock price, which is $221.88, not $172.69. Also, according to my calculations, it is no longer Q3 2010, it is Q6 2015. Thank you for your comments.

Update 3 & 4: Our sister site Engadget (via Crain’s) brought to my attention the sad fact that Showtime will not be renewing its license with Netflix this summer and, as a result, will not renew “streaming access to older seasons of currently airing shows like Dexter and Californication”. Damn shame.

@NetflixHelps posted to Twitter at 9:30pm PST, saying that streaming is officially back online. Mobile device outages are still a work in progress, and no explanation as to the cause of the problem yet. I, personally, blame Hollywood.

Update 5: Netflix announced at 2pm Wednesday that it will be offering compensation to the streaming subscribers affected by the outage. Details to be arriving in our inboxes sometime today, methinks. I applaud Netflix for doing the right thing. After all, doing the right thing always involves giving me money.

In the never-ending debate between blogging and micro-blogging, Tumblr usually gets lumped in with Twitter and Facebook on the micro-blogging side. But Tumblr is actually somewhere in between the status bursts of Twitter and Facebook and the long-form publishing of WordPress-style blogs. If anything, it is more accurately described as micro-blogging than Twitter or Facebook because you actually produce short blog posts filled with images, links, and videos. But the key to Tumblr’s incredible growth—it’s adding a quarter billion pageviews a week—is how easy it makes it to post something and reblog what your friends are posting.

Tumblr CEO David Karp recently sat down with Chris Dixon for a Founder Stories interview in which explains how he started Tumblr four years ago as a reaction to other blogging tools out there. “All blogs took the same form,” he notes. “I wanted something much more free-form, much less verbose.” People wanted to express themselves and blog, but he felt that the standard blogging platforms available at the time—Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad—were too complicated. “These tools I just don’t think worked for most people. It’s a commitment, you need to sit down for an hour and hammer out a post.”

He is quick to add that “WordPress is the best tool in the world for that” kind of publishing. But for someone like him who “doesn’t enjoy writing,” it was the wrong tool. So he created Tumblr instead, which is designed to help people get their thoughts and images up as quickly as possible, and to lower the barrier to publishing even more.

But don’t Twitter and Facebook lower those barriers even further? They do, but they lack a strong expressive identity, argues Karp. “They are not tools built for creative expression,” he says, adding: “Nobody is proud of their identity on Facebook.” Okay, he’s got a point there. Tumblr, in contrast, is built to be a place you can be proud to call your online home. It’s very design-oriented and you can customize your Tumblr to reflect your personality, but not in a cheesy MySpace way. For Twitter and Facebook, “expression isn’t necessarily something they care about.”

Update: Watch Part II , III, and IV of this interview.

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has tested five major blogging services for their reliability. Unsurprisingly given its recent woes, micro-blogging startup Tumblr received a disastrous score, while Google’s Blogger came up on top with not a second of downtime.

Pingdom’s tests were performed once a minute over a period of two months, from October 15 to December 15, from multiple locations in both North America and Europe. Included in the tests were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous. Not only the uptime of the blogging platform’s homepage was monitored, but also four individual blogs.

Pingdom found that Blogger didn’t seem to display any downtime whatsoever in the two months of testing, while WordPress.com also showed an ability to remain available most of the time. Typepad came up third, but not with a lot of difference from the two former blogging service.

When you look at the upstart, basic blogging services, the differences become more clear. Posterous showed mixed results in terms of reliability, but Tumblr clearly takes the downtime cake on that level.

According to Pingdom, some of the Tumblr blogs it monitored during the two-month window were unavailable for more than two days, beating the general downtime of the platform of 24+ hours Tumblr struggled with last week.

Clearly, the startup can use the recent capital injection to improve reliability quite a bit:

However, it should be noted that Tumblr’s problems haven’t just been a few big outages, but a large number of smaller ones. The Tumblr blogs we monitored had an average of more than 300 outages during these two months, some very brief, indicating an ongoing performance issue with the service.

Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and CEO Toni Schneider were interviewed by our own Alexia Tsotsis at Le Web 10 today. Our live notes (paraphrased):

Can you talk about your vision from blogging and how it changed from 2003 to 2010?

I really wanted software for my own blog, there was no Javascript at the time. By the time people started to really think about Web apps, WordPress was becoming more than just a blogging tool, but more of a CMS.

So now people use it to power their websites not just their blogs.

What’s the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? You transferred the trademark recently right?

Tricky one.

We started as an open source project, but where we were in 2005 we weren’t sure how to take it to the next level. What if it could be one-click simple, so that became WordPress.com. And then millions of people started using it, but we still had to consider the .org part.

We looked at the situation, and we decided the trademark belongs in a non-profit organization.

What are the challenges of building a business based on open-source technology?

The biggest challenge is to start a business based on an open-source project that wouldn’t actually kill the open source project and scare away the community. Our goal has been for both to reinforce each other, and it has worked. Both have seen growth.

How big is WordPress?

There are about 30 million publishers right now. That’s roughly 10% of all websites in the world. We’re currently getting about 300 million unique visitors on WordPress.com a month.

Are you making money?

We’re focused on growth right now, so we’ve invested a lot in infrastructure and so on. We haven’t been focused on revenues so far, but I can tell you we’re break-even.

How big is the company right now?

We’re about 74 people.

(TechCrunch: we hear that Automattic makes a little under $1 million a month from all its services combined. That’s roughly $10 million a year, based on what we’ve heard from reliable sources.)

Where does most of the revenue come from?

Most comes from premium services, the hosting service etcetera.

What’s the exit potential for Automattic?

Our goal’s not to be acquired.

Last September at TechCrunch Disrupt, Microsoft announced that all 7 million Windows Live Spaces blogs would be transitioning to WordPress.com. It turned out that number was inflated, and a subsequent internal email put the real number of transitioned blogs at 300,000.

Well, the number of Windows Live Spaces blogs which have transitioned over to WordPress.com is now at “over half a million” and another half a million new WordPress blogs have been created by Windows Live users. So that brings the total new WordPress blogs created as a result of the partnership to one million.

The total won’t get to 7 million by March, 2011 when Windows Live Spaces blogs will no longer be supported. But many of those are dead blogs anyway. A million new WordPress blogs is nothing to sneeze at. Since the deal was announced, the number of new blog sign-ups at WordPress.com has more than doubled from 400,000 a month to 900,000 a month.

First of all, the widget itself has been prettied-up quite a bit from the one we shared. You’ll now see author icons next to the author names. More importantly, you’ll see a plus sign, which, when clicked, presents a drop down that shows you exactly what stories by that author are brining in traffic on any given day. WordPress.com also removed the number of posts area, after that caused some confusion. “the top spot is not about who wrote the most posts, it’s about which author wrote the posts that got the most visits,” they note.

WordPress.com says that they liked the new icon and drop down so much, that they’ve also added it to the Referrers box as well. The result is a simple way to see things like which Twitter account is sending the most traffic your way. Pretty nifty.

WordPress.com says the stats upgrade is available for all blogs on WordPress.com and it will automatically appear if your blog has two or more authors with traffic on their posts. Automattic also notes that these features will be coming to the Stats plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs shortly.