The book publisher Packt (pronounced Packed) have just announced “… that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards.” This is the first time WordPress has won this Award.

Drupal, another CMS that I support, won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. For this category there was a very close contest between the top three: Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla!

Whilst I would expect Drupal to be among the top three in this category, Wordress is in the top five for the first time. “The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”

Also see my earlier post on WordPress …

I use it so I must recommend it.  But, actually I do think it is the best of breed platform for Blogging, and probably the most popular blogging platform.

Now a Blog is your Real Estate,  your property that is fixed in location, on the web.  Your blog’s content is not like your content in LinkedIn, Facebook, or even Twitter – for it’s accessible by search engines, and not closed like those other forms of social media – you don’t have to login to view the full content.  So to be fully visible on the web you must have a Blog, and your choice of Blogging platform is critical.

So, here once you’ve got WordPress installed, are two links to get you started.  From Lifehacker (tag line:  Tips and downloads for getting things done) is The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog, and from Mark Ghosh’s WeblogToolsCollection Schwag is WordPress for Beginners.

Of course, you must then install the All in One SEO Pack (SEO: search engine optimization) for a properly “executed SEO techniques will bring your website increased exposure, recognition, and will generate free traffic“, and Google XML Sitemaps a plugin that generates a XML-Sitemap of your blog that supports “Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.”

Then it’s just a matter of regularly generating interesting content, and “they will come” … easy – in’it.