Market Share of Blogging Tools

In preparation for the upcoming Idealware Blogging Tools report, we took a look at the market share of blog software. What tools are most commonly used, especially for organizational blogs?

This turned out to be a hard question. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been any authoritative look at market share in this sector, and the vendors themselves are talking.

We did find a few useful studies, though, which we combined together to create our own look at market share.

ProBlogger – a blog about how to blog professionally – surveyed it’s readers to find out what tools they were using. The results were pretty interesting, and presumably align reasonably well with the market share for serious bloggers.

The most commonly cited blog market share study was done on a blog called Elise.com.
While we didn’t use Elise’s actual data, we’re indebted to her for her method - looking at the number of links to each tool’s domain on Google to find the “Google share” for the tool. While not tremendously rigorous, this gives a rough sense of how much people are talking about each tool.

Lastly, we were interested particularly in what’s used in the nonprofit sector. While we couldn’t find anyone who has looked at this in particular, the Nonprofit Blog Exchangelinks to a number of nonprofit blogs (90, when we did our tally). We simply looked at the blogs (including footers and source code) and tallied who was using what tool. We were able to identify what tool 90% of those blogs were using.

So we put all this together, weighted each of these three pieces of data to make them roughly equal in importance, and figure out our own “organizational popularity” numbers. The results? Drumroll please…. The number itself is a aggregate and thus has no specific meaning, but it can be compared across tools to see the differences in magnitude.

Blogger Wordpress Typepad Movable Type Drupal Mambo/Joomla Expression Engine LiveJournal Textpattern Serendipity .Text DIA

15658 5788 3308 3648 1489 1994 855 620 381 317 231 110

May articles: Paul Hagen on CRM, and accounting packages

Idealware’s May articles are up!

Paul Hagen contributed a great article about CRM: focusing on the importance of centralizing all your constituent data, and methods to do so even if you can’t start from a clean slate: Creating the Relationship-Centric Organization: Nonprofit CRM

And we have a roundup of good accounting software, including QuickBooks, Peachtree, Fundware, The Financial Edge, Mas90, GreatPlains, and others. Need an accounting package? Start here: A Few Good Accounting Packages

And as always, we did a roundup of the month’s most interesting news and articles, which is included in the May eNewsletter.

Learning from political organizations

On Monday, I represented Idealware at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, which focused on the use of technology in the political realm. There were a lot of interesting topics and speakers - and great to attend a conference in my home city, rather than flying cross country for once.

I'm not that familiar the use of technology in politics - one of my primary reasons for going. What struck me most was that the political sector, in general, is way ahead of the nonprofit sector in effective technology use. Participant questions weren't on whether or not they should start a blog, or how to go about fundraising online, but details of implementation - what email text has proved to work best? How can you best get your organization to contribute to your blog? Almost everyone there seemed to be at a similar technology level as the largest and most savvy nonprofits. This is a lot of knowledge about issues very similar to those nonprofits face - we could learn a lot from the folks in this realm.

I also met my Washington DC doppelganger, Laura Quinn from Copernicus Analytics and the DNC Data Warehouse. She's doing really interesting work that applies data mining and regression analysis techniques to fundraising and issues of attracting supports. Something else we ought to be doing more of in the nonprofit sector.