Exactly eight years ago today, Matt Mullenweg announced that the first release of WordPress was available for download. We wonder if he knew what he was starting.

Much has happened with the blogging software since then. For one, WordPress has become the most popular blog platform in the world, which is no small feat. It’s also without a doubt one of the most successful open source projects ever created.

Protecting one’s brand is pretty much standard practice for large online properties like Facebook. As a result, the social network giant now owns hundreds of domain names, of which only a few are actually used. The rest have been taken over from others for “safekeeping.”

We find it rather amusing that Facebook itself now owns domain names such as:

Want to work for a popular, fast-growing web service with a global audience? Live in Sweden? Then you have an excellent opportunity right now.

Things are going great for us here at Pingdom. Our website monitoring service is growing by leaps and bounds, and now we’re in the midst of a push to expand our team with another set of talented individuals.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. These three companies rule webmail with Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the three largest email services on the Internet.

What might escape a lot of people, though, is just how important email services are for the online presence of those companies (yes, even for Google). To give you an idea, let’s look at some rather interesting website traffic numbers.

As you might have noticed, we’re making a new control panel for Pingdom. You can already access parts of it either by logging in directly to it, or going via our current control panel.

We thought you might enjoy a few tips on how you can use it effectively, so let’s start with a very important subject: troubleshooting downtime. After all, once you’ve received an alert from us that your website is down, you might want to have a closer look at exactly what the problem is.

As an added benefit, much of what we tell you here below are things you can apply in the existing control panel, so you practically get two lessons for the price of one. Neat, huh?

We know that there are approximately two billion Internet users in the world, but how are they distributed? More specifically, how are they spread over the world’s time zones? The world population isn’t spread evenly, and neither is the Internet population.

We couldn’t find this information anywhere, so we collected the data ourselves and did the necessary calculations to be able to put together this chart. We hope you will find it useful.

Apple earned a massive profit of $419,528 per employee in the past 12 months. That beats Google, Microsoft, Intel and a bunch of other big tech companies by quite some margin.

One reason (of several) that profit per employee is such an interesting metric is because it gives you a number that doesn’t depend so much on the size of the company. In other words, it becomes easy to compare companies of different sizes.

We have calculated the yearly profit per employee for a selection of big tech companies that are publicly traded on NYSE and NASDAQ: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Yahoo, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, HP, Dell.

As a server OS, Linux has long been highly successful and a poster child for open source. For example, Linux currently powers a majority of the world’s web servers and supercomputers. As a desktop OS, however, Linux has yet to gain mainstream acceptance.

That said, there are some countries where people have embraced Linux on the desktop to a greater degree than most.

Since you probably wouldn’t be able to guess which these countries are no matter how hard you tried, we have highlighted them in this article. Read on to find out where desktop Linux is most popular, plus some nice bonus stats.

According to Google, there are currently 100 million activated Android devices, and the user base is growing by leaps and bounds. Each day, 400,000 new Android devices are activated. That’s the equivalent of 146 million new Android devices per year.

Does that mean that one year from now, we’ll have 246 million Android devices? At the current growth rate, yes, but here’s the thing: Android’s adoption rate so far has been accelerating.

Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic built on top the world-famous Wordpress software, is about to hit another major milestone: 20 million hosted blogs.

Now on to the insane part: Tumblr, which has to be considered a relative newcomer on the blogging scene, has now almost caught up with Wordpress.com. The difference between the two is currently just 1.5 million blogs, and that is shrinking fast.

Google is intrinsically associated with the city of Mountain View, California. That’s where the Google HQ, a.k.a. the Googleplex, is located. Mountain View itself has been subjected to a number of Google’s experiments through the years, like free Wi-Fi Internet for the entire city, self-driving cars, and more.

But Google has more than 26,000 employees, and a majority of these do not work in Mountain View. In fact, Google has as many as 75 offices around the world.

We were pleasantly surprised the other day when one of our users announced that he had used our REST API to build a very nice third-party Pingdom app for Windows Phone 7. It’s called Pingdom Pulse.

The guy behind the WP7 app is Will Johnson, a developer from the UK. The app is free, looks good and runs well, so if you have a Pingdom account and a WP7 phone, check it out. It works with both free and paid Pingdom accounts.

Five years ago, Apple was a successful company with the iPod and its Mac line of computers. But it had not yet launched the iPhone. It had not yet launched the iPad. Back then, Apple’s yearly profit was $2.4 billion. In 2010 that number had risen to $16.6 billion. And in the first quarter of 2011, Apple has already made a $6 billion profit, well on its way to eclipsing previous years. It’s become a cash machine.

Apple is riding a wave of continuous success, and the stock market simply loves it. The value of the company has skyrocketed.

That’s the part we will take a closer look at in this article. How well has Apple done compared with other big tech companies in the last five years, i.e. 2011 compared to 2006, the year before Apple launched the iPhone?

We just launched a sneak preview of a brand new Pingdom control panel, your interface to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service. We’re calling it My Pingdom.

It’s a work in progress and currently only the reports section is available for your perusal, but we wanted to get it out there so we could start getting feedback from you, our great users. Your feedback will help us make this new control panel as good as it can be.

It’s no secret that Yahoo has seen brighter days and that Google has come to utterly dominate the Web in a way that Yahoo just can’t compete with anymore.

But lo and behold, there are still some places where Yahoo is ranked higher than Google. They’re few and far between, but they do exist, and in some pretty big markets, too.

It has probably escaped no one that Amazon had several days of serious issues with its cloud hosting service last week, which took a large number of sites either fully or partly offline, including sites like Reddit, Foursquare and Quora.

We bet the team over at Mozilla is about to pop open a few bottles of bubbly. Why? Because Firefox 4 just sailed past 100 million downloads. The new browser version was released to the public on March 22.

Even for such a widely used software as a web browser, 100 million downloads in a month is quite an accomplishment.

We noticed an interesting thing the other day that we’d like to share with you. However, if you’re a Linux enthusiast, you may want to stop reading now…

These are the operating system stats for April for the United States.

Arguably, there are currently only two superpowers on the planet: the United States and China. Now that the world is growing increasingly dependent on the Internet, how do these two giants stack up online?

We’ve taken a number of Internet-related metrics to compare the two countries, things like the number of Internet users, Internet penetration, the speed of Internet connections, the number of domain names, favorite websites, web browsers, operating systems and more.