WordPress.com snobbery

Posted May 1, 2006
Filed under: Web |

I’ve been noticing that a lot of the articles that get Dugg (I mean, make it to the front page of Digg.com) are hosted by WordPress.com. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few (besides my Microsoft Word post):

And those are just ones that I remember recently — surely there have been a lot more. It’s safe to assume that pages that make it to the Digg front page are sufficiently interesting and well-written to attract a lot of attention from a large, educated and tech-savvy audience. What kind of author would create this kind of post? Probably an educated, tech-savvy and insightful blogger with some expertise in a particular subject.

So the question is this: why are educated, tech-savvy, insightful experts so likely to use WordPress.com? 

It’s obvious why you would want to use a hosted service for submissions to Digg. Those services are better equipped to deal with the load that a popular article might bring on (you also see a fair amount of blogspot-hosted blogs on Digg). But I see more WP.com blogs on Digg than Blogger blogs — and considering that (as of right now) WordPress.com has 169,000 blogs while Blogger surely has millions, the proportion of WP.com blog submissions to Digg that make it to the front page is much higher than blogspot submissions.

So why WordPress.com? I think it’s because, as far as free blogging services go, WordPress.com is the absolute bleeding edge. Think about it:

  • WordPress.com is a test case for WordPressμ. The features that are going to be included in new versions of WordPress hit WP.com first. So far, we’ve seen a brand new and much improved rich post editor, an innovative codeless blog customization system that lets people add widgets to their blogs to customize their blog appearance and sidebar, and a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting
  • WordPress.com also has features that aren’t even put into MU, like a very cool blog and feed stats page that uses Flash to display the most recent viewer data
  • Unlike other free services, WordPress.com has all the bells and whistles — comments, trackbacks, categories, password protection, easy customization, multi-author blogs and multiple blogs per user, community tagging, image upload, per-category feeds and feed options, etc. Each of these features can be found on another free service, but no other free service has all of these features
  • The WordPress.com user community is extremely active and responsive. The forums are widely used, and even the service’s creators participate in the discussion, responding very quickly to requests for new features, bug fixes and new themes
  • And… WordPress.com is still evolving. It seems that at least one major new feature gets added every month

Of course, the savvy internet fiend knows what to look for in a good blogging platform, and inevitably ends up at WordPress.com (unless he’s rich, in which case he buys some hardcore webhosting and does a custom WP2.0 install!). Hence, a disproportionate number of experts and good authors use WP.com, and the preferences of those experts and authors are reflected on social news sites like Digg.com.

Update: I forgot to mention one blog that got seriously dugg: MacNewbie. The entire blog was posted to Digg, not just one post, and it made it to the front page!