Last Saturday was the annual WordCamp San Francisco, another one of those conferences I wish I had time and money to attend.

This is a one-day event for users and developers of WordPress, the blogging platform that powers this waste of bandwidth, to meet and learn from each other.

It’s also the first of a increasing number of similar meetings in cities around the world for those of us using WP (when is one going to be organized in DC?)

And, evidently, the numbers of us using WP are big and growing.

And for WordPress.org (the self-hosted, open-source version), Mullenweg announced today that there are 2.6 million active user-installed WordPress blogs in the wild. This figure is based on real data (not sampling), similar to Mozilla accumulating browser stats. Downloads from WordPress.org went over 11 million since last summer (up from 2.8 million the year before), thanks to over 11 new WP releases.

Those stats don’t include many blogs hosted at WordPress.com and EduBlogs, both of which use WordPress Multiuser.

I switched to WP about four years ago and have also installed systems for many friends.

I also recently upgraded the three parts of this site to WP 2.6, the most recent version, and with each new release, I’ve been very impressed by the ever increasing quality and abilities of the software.

WordPress has evolved beyond being just a blogging package. It’s becoming a flexible, all-purpose personal publishing system.