339 days

Athima Chansanchai

Will Tumblr be the Facebook to Wordpress' MySpace?

Blogging may be so yesterday to cutting edge technorati and others who like to stay 10 years ahead of the curve, but it's not going to die anytime soon and now, bloggers seem to be flocking faster to Tumblr than to Wordpress.com. Does this signal the beginning of the end for Wordpress? Will it go the way of MySpace, while Tumblr ascends to Facebook-like popularity?

As of this morning (Pacific time), Tumblr has more than 20.9 million blogs, while Wordpress.com clocked in at a little over 20.8 million. But the volume of daily new content really tells the story: Tumblr posts numbered over 31.2 million today, while Wordpress.com has yet to crack 500,000 posts.

Tumblr has been on a dramatic uptick since January, when NPR reported the four-year-old site had more than 7 million blogs. As Mashable notes, that's pretty impressive for a site that arrived on the scene four years after Wordpress. Maybe, Mashable's Sarah Kessler writes, that's because "Most Tumblr blogs function much more like another social media presence — something like a cross between websites and Facebook profiles." 

Wordpress.com may be condemned by its own oversharing, with these stats: "Today 374,885 bloggers posted 432,230 posts and 406,447 comments. That’s about 300 posts per minute, and 282 comments per minute. In total 96,585,980 words were written. That's more than 2 times larger than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, which has about 40 million words!"

But it's not all puppies and rainbows for these blogging behemoths. Both sites have been hit by calamity in the past year. Wordpress.com's servers were breached in April (leading to the theft of sensitive data, one of many companies which fell victim to hacking attacks this year) while Tumblr screeched to a halt for two whole days in December due to scheduled maintenance that "went haywire."

More stories:

• Bloggers beware: WordPress.com data breached
• Tumblr down! Hipster apocalypse nears second day
• Tumblr blogging service up after major outage

Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who does enough blogging right here on msnbc.com, thank you very much, to venture much into Wordpress or Tumblr.