All idle conjecture, to be sure.

But I don’t really disagree with your final sentence.

Drupal is similar to WordPress in that it is free, damn good, open source, etc. It’s apparently good enough for some pretty high-profile sites. I bet the number of those sites that credit Drupal rounds down to zero.

Because the people who are reading your site for its content (or using it to shop or whatever) simply don’t care what software it is running. For blogs it makes a bit more sense because blogs are often read by other bloggers. But if someone said “I took it off because who cares?” I wouldn’t argue with them.

1. I intentionally didn’t keep a separate list–once I’d gone through and rechecked the “u” cases, I sorted everything into one list. So, to do such a survey, I’d have to go back through more than two hundred blogs, rechecking presence of WordPress identification. Which isn’t a huge amount of work, but…

2. I don’t believe the topic is major enough to justify the couple of hours the first step would take and the hour or more that preparing the email list, or sending each one an individual note, would take.

Sorry if it sounds as though I’m begging off doing additional work, but my track record on reward for effort is getting so consistently close to zero that, well, yes, I’m begging off doing additional work. I don’t think the results would be worth the effort. I thought this was an interesting curiosity, and very little more than that.

Do all the folks who don’t credit WordPress, but are still publishing, have a contact form or email address? I wonder if they’d agree to answer a short Wufoo survey for you. It would be interesting to see why they’ve chosen not to credit WordPress in an obvious way.

Interesting because I hope the whole handmade theme/no explicit credit for WordPress thing is just coincidence. I’m not sure why someone wouldn’t credit WordPress just because they use a handmade theme. Back when the earth was new and we all had static home pages, making your own theme was synonymous with making your own website. That’s no longer the case. The nice folks from WordPress happen to make it pretty easy to skin their software (either with your own markup or with a readymade theme), but what the project focuses on is software, not skins.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s important to credit WordPress. I don’t think it matters if you do it in a footer or on an About page.

I’d guess that two-thirds of the 29 are adaptations of standard templates, close enough so that I would have said “That’s a WordPress blog” just by the appearance. Those are the ones I find particularly interesting–and particularly ones, say, that left in the “Meta” sidebar heading, but excised the WordPress link. For the other group, yes, it makes sense that if you’ve built your theme from scratch, you wouldn’t go out of your way to include a credit line.

This isn’t a big deal, of course–WordPress certainly doesn’t require or specifically ask for credit. I just found it interesting–particularly, as noted, in the cases where the template doesn’t appear handmade and the excision had to be done deliberately.