For this week's Friday Fact Box I wanted to focus on WordPress. Since the recent WordCamp Cape Town - the idea of gathering some statistics on it has been rumbling around in my head. I wasn't lucky enough to attend WordCamp myself, but Tim was - and he pointed out to me that the definitive statistics had already been listed by founder Matt Mullenweg as a part of his presentation, which is available on Zoopy.

So here we go, this week's Friday Fact Box provides statistics straight from the founder, and has even gone all multimedia on you. The growth of this platfom is astounding. After the video I've directly quoted some statistics from Matt's blog about the browser and operating system use on WordPress.com that he shared in July. Thanks Matt (and Tim)!

From Zoopy.com Matt Mullenweg - WordCamp South Africa 2008 - Part 1 August 2008 

• Number of changes to the platform 2007: 1000
• Number of changes to the platform 2008: approx 2000
• Downloads from the site 2007: 2.6 million
• Downloads from the site 2008: 11.1million
• New blogs on WordPress.com 2007: 1 million
• New blogs on WordPress.com 2008: 2.3 million
• New Posts: 35 million new posts
• New Page Views: 6.5 billion
• New Features: "a bigillion"
• New users “since last Saturday” (from the date of Matt's presentation): 200 000
• Number of WordPress blogs currently:  6.7 million
• The average active plug-ins per WordPress blog: 4.96
• The average amount of plug-ins per WordPress blog: 9 
• Number of words per month on Wordpress.com: 1.4 billion

From MA.TT Unlucky In Cards IE6 Independence? July 2008

   1. 59.41% - Internet Explorer (down 3.05%), sub-breakdown:
         1. 53.42% - Version 7.0 (up 18.25%)
         2. 46.28% - Version 6.0 (down 17.82%)
         3. 0.14% - Version 5.5 (down 0.14%)
   2. 32.82% - Firefox (up 2.08%)
   3. 4.81% - Safari (up 0.98%)
   4. 2.04% - Opera (up 0.26%)
   5. 0.41% - Mozilla (down 0.11%)

The operating system breakdown:

   1. 89.41% - Windows (down 0.95%)
   2. 7.86% - Macintosh (up 1.13%)
   3. 1.82% - Linux (down 0.37%)
   4. 0.17% - iPhone (out of nowhere!)
   5. 0.10% - PlayStation Portable (up 0.07%)