How Do You MU?

So, how big are WPMU sites? This survey question, “how many blogs at your site,” drew a very wide variety of responses. The median response was 25. The mean response was 10,234, but this was driven up by WordPress.com and a few other sites with many thousands of blogs.

The question that drew the least surprising(to me) responses was the one about number of admins. Most WPMU sites have but one.

Related to the question of “how many blogs” is the question of “do you have to do anything to get a blog other than asking for one”? The answer to this question drives the distinction, which I make in the sidebar of this blog, between WPMU hosts and WPMU-driven networks. The latter do some sort of check before granting a new blog.

John, of WPMU network Digital Photography Blogs, was kind enough to answer some emailed interview questions relating to the decision to make a WPMU site a network, rather than a host. Here are some of his remarks.

There are two main reasons [for restricting blog creation].  First, as DPBlogs will be the first site to be integrated Glue, we wanted to put our best foot forward.  Second, we will shortly be implementing a revenue sharing program on DPBlogs and aim to make the best impression with potential advertisers.  Both reasons mean we need to maintaining tight control over the quality of the blogs.  In the future, we hope to have premium blogs (those which require application) and free general blogs.

Our decision to require application for DPBlogs has definitely restricted the growth of the number of blogs.  However, doing so provides a very clean and informative site.  Readers can quickly find good content and blogs which fit their specific area(s) of interest.

You can see more of the interview, and more statistics from the survey, in this document. It’ll probably be the last of its kind I post, since I’ve now posted about the responses to almost all the survey questions, it’s time to write a paper about the survey, and I have a ton of other things I need to do.

Has it been over a month since I updated this site? Do I know what rhetorical means?

I’ve just updated the lists in the sidebar. A couple of new networks and a few new hosts, several of which are non-English.

A recently-started topic at the WPMU forums concerns scalability. The original poster asked about scaling WPMU to a million blogs. The first reply was about WordPress.com, and the next was about Lyceum. I’ll be following this topic with interest.

I’ve created a Squidoo lens on WPMU. That’s pretty much it for this post. I won’t repeat here what I just posted to my main blog about Squidoo.

The 20th addition to the list of WPMU hosts in the sidebar is Pointillist Press. As its name suggests, this is a site with a very distinctive look. You currently need an invite to get a blog there.

In other news, service at Webloog.com has been suspended. I’ll leave the link on the sidebar, because I understand that it’s a temporary condition.

I note that there are 400 EduBlogs! I confess that I have contributed to the growth twice as much as I perhaps should, by starting a second blog: mgtprof. I’ll post my excuse for starting a second edublog as soon as I get the password. I still haven’t received it, more than an hour after starting the blog. I don’t know whether the delay is due to edublogs, to my work email, or…

I also note that James responded “forever” to my question about the intended lifespan of edublogs.org. (See comments to the upgrade planned post.)

Thanks again, James, for EduBlogs. I promise not to start a third blog here without asking first!