I was checking out Google’s fancy new tool, Google Trends.

Just for kicks, I compared Movable type (MT), WordPress, TypePad, Live Journal, and Blogspot. Here are the results:

Blogging Software Battle for Mind Share

Matt, Toni, congratulations on doing such a great job of capturing the public’s imagination.

My take on this: Automattic should be delighted. Sixapart should be concerned. Why should they be concerned? Both SixApart and WordPress are doing all the things you need to create a community around your product. Check out Guy Kawasaki’s great article “The Art of Creating a Community” for more details.

Both WordPress and SixApart do everything that Guy recommends. Here’s Guy’s list:

• Create something worth building a community around.


• Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately!


• Assign one person the task of building a community.


• Give people something concrete to chew on.


• Create an open system.


• Welcome criticism.


• Foster discourse.


• Publicize the existence of the community

So why is WordPress succeeding and Movable Type losing steam? I think there are multiple reasons. SixApart has MT, TypePad and LiveJournal to focus on. Automattic has one code base, and that’s it. So, focus is clearly part of it. WordPress is open-source and MT is not. That’s another part of the explanation. However, I there is a more significant reason.

The WordPress architecture allows for a wider range of participation from their community. WordPress and MT are both blogging tools with plug-in architecture. That means that a community of hackers can easily contribute to both systems. But, WordPress has made it easier for less technical hackers and designers to contribute. The difference is subtle, but the WordPress team has made it almost iPod-easy to participate in designing how a WordPress blog looks and feels.

WordPress has Themes. A Theme is a collection of templates and style sheets that describe a blog. MT has something similar in their Styles, with their Style Library and their StyleCatcher plugin.

What’s the difference? You be the judge:

To be sure, TypePad is still a much larger site than WordPress, as these results from Alexaholic show.

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Here are a few other interesting results from Google Trends.

Open Source Projects - WordPress is starting to show up on the radar.

Potential Enterprise Class Web Office Platforms

There are a few names that have not started to show up extensively. Joyent makes an appearance, Traction Software isn’t yet on the radar, and the full capability of Blogtronix is still in stealth mode. I have seen bits and pieces of all three and been increadibly impressed.

Big Players - Not sure this says a lot, but it is interesting:

The State of Ruby on Rails

As I have said before, my guess is that the most successful Web Office tools will be built using Ruby on Rails. Whenever I meet leaders from the Ruby and Ruby on Rails community, I get a sense of what it must have been like for Steve Jobs to have walked into Xerox PARC in 1976.

Ruby on Rails is as Agile as you get. Think behavior driven development, pair-programming, domain specific languages, scaffolds, OO and a brilliant, confident focus on Getting Real. Guys like Dave Thomas, Jason Hoffman, and David Young are some of the smartest guys in the room.

So…. what does Google Trends have to say about Ruby on Rails, and the offerings of some of the big players in the space, including Joyent and 37 Signals?

I threw in WordPress as a point of comparison. Obviously, it is still early days. If you do not know what rails is, go to www.rubyonrails.org, click on the link under the title “Get Excited” and make Jason Hoffman’s day by watching the Putting Flickr on Rails screen cast. Nothing makes Jason happier than knowing that thousands of people are watching videos served up by TextDrive. Even if you are not an engineer or technologist, it is worth your time to watch the whole 5 minutes. It will show you clearly how much faster it is to develop web applications in Ruby on Rails.