Regular readers will notice this site has changed a bit in recent days. There’s a new look – or theme in Wordpress‘ private language – and a handful of new features. This is because I’ve just moved from a wordpress.com site to a self-hosted version of the site at billbennett.co.nz. Once things settle down – and a week after the move things still aren’t right -I may comment more on the switch.

There are however a couple of pressing issues to worry about. First, I’ve arranged things so anyone visiting my old site is automatically transferred to the new one. The automatic redirection is largely working, but it isn’t perfect. There are a few information pages here with different URLs. It’s not that important, but for a while I was using a redirection plug-in to route people looking for the old pages to the new replacements. This had to go as the plug-in was causing problems elsewhere.

My other problem is my online identity is closely tied to my old Wordpress address. I’m registered with dozens of other sites as billbennettnz with pointers to the old site. While the redirection from wordpress.com to here is in operation this won’t matter. I’ve paid for a year in advance and could go on paying for subsequent years. But I’d prefer to either retire the old wordpress.com identity and create a new one or, even better, update that identity to reflect the new reality.

OK you’re saying, why don’t you Google for an answer to this? Or perhaps look for information on how to do this at the Wordpress support site. Fair enough. But my need is so obscure that I don’t have a clue about the terms to search for.

According to Halfdone, New Zealand has roughly 200 blogs of note. When I analysed these for my New Zealand’s top Wordpress.com sites list, Google’s Blogspot accounted for 50 percent of the total, Wordpress.com was a shade under 20 percent, Typepad had only a four percent share and the remainder were not immediately obvious.

It’s not immediately obvious why Blogspot (also known as Blogger) dominates. To me the technology appears dated and the Blogspot sites look inferior to Wordpress.com sites. As far as beginners are concerned, Wordpress is slightly more intimidating to use, but far more flexible and, once mastered, it is in fact easier. It makes better use of graphics and  has many useful built-in features.

So why does Blogspot dominate?

At first, I assumed it was because Blogspot, being owned by Google has a higher profile. It’s easier to find and the Blogspot name is more descriptive of what it does. These things matter for raw beginners. This visibility is probably a factor in its success.

Safety may also be a factor. People know who and what Google is, so they feel comfortable. Wordpress is obscure by comparison and something of an unknown.

There could be a mercenary reason. Blogspot allows users to place Google Ads on their blogs, which, theoretically at least, means they can earn money. Not much. In fact, I doubt if anyone below the top ten New Zealand blogs has seen as much as a dollar from Google’s advertising. Wordpress doesn’t allow Google ads on its hosted blogs. Occasionally Wordpress may put one of its own ads on a Wordpress.com blog.

Scrubone, who runs Halfdone, suggested the reason for Blogspot’s success is that it’s been around a lot longer than Wordpress. This is true and it is likely to be a major reason, even though many of the Blogspot sites in the list were created fairly recently. Being the incumbent player in a technology market is often enough to ensure some degree of success.

Can anyone suggest any other reasons for Blogspot’s continuing popularity in New Zealand?

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• Moving from Blogger to Wordpress (rchurt.com)

Tim Selwyn at Tumeke! and Scrubone at Halfdone both do a great job of providing useful lists of New Zealand blog stats. So, in a way I’m standing on the shoulders of giants producing a new list focused exclusively on New Zealand-based Wordpress.com sites. My aim is to learn more about the way Wordpress.com is used by New Zealanders (and Wordpress.org as well but that’s another story).

Tumeke and Halfdone update their lists each month. I haven’t decided yet, how often this list will be updated. Stay tuned.

The two general lists use different formulae to rank sites in order of popularity. Tumeke’s list shorter, but more comprehensive and can be considered as much as a directory as a popularity list. The Halfdone rankings are based on traffic rankings.

Both use data from Alexa. I’m slightly dubious about Alexa because my understanding is it measures traffic using a toolbar which some people install as a browser add-on. Given the number of Alexa toolbar users is only a tiny fraction of all internet users, this make for a small sample size. A small sample size isn’t an issue for measuring the major web sites — and possibly the top half dozen or so New Zealand blogs — but it’s a crude instrument for measuring sites where the weekly traffic is measured in the hundreds or low-thousands. I could be wrong about this, let me know in the comments if I’ve misunderstood how it works.

Here I’ve taken the Halfdone list and extracted the sites that have recognisable Wordpress.com addresses. Halfdone ranks 199 sites. Of these 99 use Blogspot, 38 use Wordpress.com, eight use Typepad and 54 either use a different technology or have domain name redirection (see the pie chart). I suspect at least some of these use either Wordpress.com or Wordpress.org technology.

As you can see, Blogspot dominates the New Zealand scene. I’ve got some ideas about why this is the case. In my opinion it is inferior to both Wordpress.com and Typepad; I’ve used all three at some time or other. For my money Wordpress.com is easier to use and the results always look better than Blogspot. We’ll look more at this issue later.

New Zealand’s top Wordpress.com blogs:

Here’s the raw list with rankings taken from Halfdone’s list. If you operate a New Zealand-based or New Zealand-focused Wordpress.com blog, leave a message in the comments and I’ll add your site to the list. I’m planning to reorganise the ranking system by the time I publish an updated version of this list.

1 Homepaddock

2 Dim Post

3 Poneke’s Weblog

4 The Inquiring Mind

5 Something should go here, maybe later.

6 The visible hand in economics

7 Hitting Metal With A Hammer

8 G.blog

9 Jafapete’s Weblog

10 Newzblog

11 Samuel Dennis

12 In a strange land

13 Aotearoa: a wider perspective

14 Luddite Journo

15 Kiwi Polemicist

16 Consumist

17 100 Word Blog

18 Ideologically Impure

19 Dear John

20 Object Dart

21 Ethical Martini

22 Contradiction

23 Knowledge Workers

24 Anarchia

25 Renascent Exegete

26 John Ansell

27 Socialist Democracy

28 the gossip

29 The Reluctant Botanist

30 Concerned of Linwood

31 anarchafairy

32 Still Truckin’

33 The sprout and the bean

34 the Nicholas O’Kane blog

35 Si Quando Dubium, Illic Est Scilicet

36 Maidennz