An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market

A good article in many ways, but I have concerns about the numbers quoted.
Obtaining stats from Google on the number of sites that link to www.ads-software.com is not at all an accurate reflection of the number of users of this software. WordPress is compared to many tools which, under their licenses, REQUIRES a link to the hosting service/software provider. Under the GPL, WordPress users only link back to www.ads-software.com if they so choose. There is absolutely no obligation to do so.
Comparing WordPress to Blogger or Movable Type or other similar tools based on links back to the Mothership is not an accurate method of measurement.
Let’s all get out there and promote WordPress, folks! The devs and others give freely of their time and talents in creating, maintaining and updating WordPress, the least we can do is blog about WordPress regularly and link, link, link! ??
Unless you don’t want to, which is fine. ?? The beauty of open-source is in the support of the various communities, though, so consider this peer-pressure from a radioactive moose! ??

and there are lots of site that does not get linked from anywhere so well wont make it to google…
this request is long time pending… a ping at the time of installation if the user allows it to add to the coutner fo WP installations.

@sushubh,
But what about when someone re-installs WordPress? Won’t that skew the numbers?
Not only that, this article can’t account for any blogging software that can be integrated into an existing site. Even using a bot to crawl for WP or other sites is limited, because with the GPL license, I can delete all of the meta-tag information from the index.php file and no robot will know that it’s not my own blogger software.
It’s an interesting thing Elise is trying to do, but, as with many things on the internet, it’s nearly impossible to get an accurate gauge of numbers.

well then there are the blogs which are often defined as one post wonders. we cant certainly expect a user to ping a counter URI on a weekly basis. but well after a install a ping would certainly work. and as for reinstalls, the URI stays the same… ??
not the perfect way. and would add some dead enteries but would be more close to an accurate guess.

It also doesn’t account for MT users multiblogging from the one install, a point Matt made a few days ago.

For a WP count at the big G I use */wp-login.php. As with all things Google the results are erratic but it might be a good indication.