Comments on: WordPress founder talks traffic, new features to Web 2.0 crowd

What's the happening with WordPress in the future? Founder Matt Mullenweg knows.

[Scabr]

WordPress 2.5 - great operation! Waiting WP 3.0...

[colinscroggins]

While there is no doubt that Wordpress has healthy growth, it is worth pointing out that in order to use the Akismet comment spam filtering plug-in on the OSS version of Wordpress, you must create a Wordpress.com account. Akismet was introduced in late 2005, and with the growth of comment spam, it is reasonable to think that these accounts make up a healthy chunk of the Wordpress.com unique user growth.

The more accurate number would be active users who have posted an entry to their Wordpress.com blog in the last 6 months.

[sherryness]

I am definitely looking forward to both of these new features. The Sphere plug-in will be very useful and the designer in me likes the idea of dressing up different posts in different ways!

[raananSF]

@josh & @colinscroggins --

( I work for Automattic ).

Just a quick clarification: the 168 million uniques numbers, is the number of readers/visitors to WordPress.com blogs.

We are just about to cross 3 million blogs created on WordPress.com -- and that number does not include people who signup for accounts just for commenting or to use Akismet.

[Josh.Lowensohn]

Impressive. Thanks for the stats Raanan.

[Familyresource4u]

The best of wordpress is Akismet. At this point, Automattic makes money from Akismet, I believe. With more and more third party spam killer plug-ins, I wonder how Automattic will go from here. Also more and more larger bloggers will use wordpress and set their blogs in their own domain. What will be the business model of Automattic in the future?

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[steveorevo]

Does anyone know about figures relating to how many WordPress blogs are in operation, including WordPress.com, but third party ISPs, and general OSS users that have setup the software for themselves?

[flyoracle]

Agree, the best plugin of wordpress is Akismet, it helps us filter more than hundreds of spams commend in last year. It automatically filters spam based on black list I guess. It works perfectly.

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