While WordCamp 2008 attendees were likely impressed with the huge number of page views (6.5 billion per year – roughly one for every person on the planet) and monthly unique visitors (up to 160 million per month) being racked up by wordpress.com, I was focused on a different number.

2,604,288. That’s the number of people running WordPress blogging software on their own websites, with their own web hosting. You’d think that only a hard-core techie fringe would choose to pay for their own web hosting, and deal with the geekiness of it all, when they can get WordPress for free on wordpress.com.  But, as of this morning, 3,870,299 blogs were running on wordpress.com.  That’s a close race.

In other words, the do-it-yourself web crowd is looking mainstream, not fringe.

The one-click install revolution on web hosts has made this possible.  The amount of software/web services power at your disposal with today’s inexpensive web hosting is ridiculous.  Take a look at a typical menu of open source software choices (this one is from Simple Scripts).  Blogs, wikis, forums, serious content management, e-commerce, CRM…often the best software in its category.  We know people are using install scripts, because of the growing number of blogs that are launching with slightly out-of-date versions of WordPress.  (Script services are often behind the latest version, one of the downsides of using one-click installs vs. slapping it together by hand.)

Not all is perfect in one-click install land.  Upgrades and backups are nowhere near as painless as getting started.  But it’s been good enough to compete with free, and it keeps hope alive for a more open web future:  not everything has to happen through Google, Yahoo!, MSN or even wordpress.com.