As mentioned, WordPress takes up the lion’s share at 48%, and interestingly, custom blog platforms are on the rise, coming in at 14%. No one is using Bricolage or Expression Engine anymore, and strangely, Tumblr only accounted for one site. Movable Type and Drupal are relatively popular at 7 and 6 % respectively. Five sites use Gawker. TypePad and BlogSmith are notably on the decline since 2009.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg had this to say on the current position of his platform, ”The last few years we’ve really focused on both the usability and flexibility of WordPress, which has resulted in accelerating growth in both big and small sites. I expect even higher adoption among the largest sites and blogs over the next year.” Speaking of the “big” sites, here is a list of the top 10:

Interestingly, WordPress accounts for only 3 of the top 10 blogs presently online. The Huffington Post, the world’s biggest, uses Movable Type, and 50% of the blogs on the list use a custom platform or opted not to answer.

With Tumblr rapidly becoming very popular, reporting 100 million unique visitors and over 15 billion pageviews per month in January, it’s evident that the survey results might look a bit different in 2015.

WordPress announced today on their blog the release of their new WordPress REST API. It promises to let users create content using all the sites on the WordPress.com network as well as Jetpack-enabled sites in the near future.

What does the new API give developers access to? You can access posts and comments, and follow, like and reblog content for users. As for other features, you can also access the sites’s Freshly Pressed content through the API.

One of the first apps to use the REST API is the WordPress app for Windows 8. You can check it out here. It looks really nice as most Windows 8 apps usually do.

To make using and adding data on WordPress easier, the API uses OAuth2 protocol to authenticate requests for data. Public data can be accessed, however, through unauthenticated requests. You will need to use authenticated requests when making new posts or comments. It also uses a standardized JSON object when returning data.

The really nice news is that the REST API self-documents itself. The Developer Resources Blog will automatically update whenever the WordPress team adds new endpoints. In more nice news, it also includes a console inside the browser for running queries and seeing data in real time.

The API is available now for your development needs. You can even sign up for OAuth2 tokens without having to wait through an approval cycle. So why wait, get cracking on some cool new WordPress applications.

Now it looks like Posterous users might see the writing on the wall, too. It seems they’re leaving Posterous for WordPress in significant numbers. Since February of 2010 WordPress has offered new users a tool for importing their Posterous blogs to WordPress. It seems that since yesterday’s announcement that tool has seen a massive spike in use. In fact, use of WordPress’s Posterous importer has risen by over 250% since yesterday’s announcement, according to a post on the official WordPress blog.

Now, as previously noted, neither Twitter nor Posterous said anything in their announcements about Posterous being shut down. Each post, however, included a promise to offer tools to migrate or back up their Posterous content “in the coming weeks.” It looks like a sizable portions of Posterous’s users have decided to get a jump on things and move their stuff now.

Of course, WordPress isn’t the only option available, but it does appear to be the easiest. As Lifehacker points out, it is also possible to migrate your Posterous account to another blogging service like Blogger or Tumblr. Until Posterous/Twitter release their own export tools, however, the process for moving your stuff to Blogger or Tumblr is a bit more cumbersome.

Posterous users, will you be moving your content? If so, will you go to WordPress, or to another service? Do you think Twitter will shut down Posterous? Let us know in the comments.

“When you click on or hover over a country name, the map zooms in so you can really get a feel for all the parts of the planet your content has reached,” explains Jeff Bowen on the WordPress.com blog.

“The Summaries page shows you country stats for the previous week, month, quarter and all time, but keep in mind this feature is new and views by country are not available prior to March 2012,” he adds.

He also hints that more features are on the way for the My Stats tab.

WordPress.com blogs have been getting a lot of features lately. Other recent additions include: comment notifications, a Chrome extension, and increased storage limits.

“Clicking Reply automatically approves a comment and displays an area for you to type a reply in,” says Greg on the WordPress.com blog. “When you’re done, just click Reply and you can get back to whatever you were working on, without having to navigate to the dashboard to manage your comments.”

If you use threaded comments, you’ll see when a person responds directly to you in the notification.

Comments can still be managed from the dashboard, of course.

This is just the newest in a series of recent improvements to the WordPress.com experience. A couple weeks ago, they launched a Chrome extension, giving users the ability to use WordPress.com from other sites.

Last month, they upped the storage limit.

Users will get notifications anytime they get a new follower or like.

When you have the extension installed, it will display a follow button whenever you’re on a site with RSS feeds, so you can easily follow it from your WordPress.com account. This includes not only WordPress sites, but blogs on Blogger, Tumblr, etc.

There’s a “press this” button, which lets you quickly post content to your blog without having to actually go to it. This gives you a box that looks like this:

It will even let you post an excerpt of text with a link by highlighting what you want to post before you click the button. Like I said: handy.