If you’ve looked at your WordPress.com blog stats today, you might have noticed the charts look a little different. We’ve replaced the old proprietary chart object with Open Flash Chart, an open source alternative.  Charts now look like this:

(Though I can’t guarantee you’ll see numbers like that). All the old charts are still available in more or less the same form.  And we’re hoping to explore some of the new possibilities Open Flash Chart has to offer – so keep an eye on your stats.  Like we had to ask. And in case you missed it: yes, blog stats now work in your time zone.

In April we introduced Instant Findability, TED video embeds, a springtime theme, a cool new domain, and reply-by-email for comments, now open to all. A pretty busy month, with more awesome features on the way, plus WordCamp San Francisco, on May 30. If you’re in town or want a reason to be, be sure to register soon. We’ve got a great speaker line-up, free WordPress schwag to give away, and, of course, a BBQ lunch. Here are the stats for April:

370,053 blogs were created. 401,320 new users joined. 5,206,156 file uploads. 3,050 gigabytes of new files. 775 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters. 8,691,962 comments. 6,991,335 logins. 1,162,296,607 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,130,311,791 on self-hosted blogs (2,292,608,398 total across all WordPress blogs we track). 1,904,262 active blogs and 19,665,407 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor. 1,569,961,240 words.

Other cool stuff: After tallying the community vote, the judges panel (Derek Powazek, Matt Thomas, and myself) selected two winning designs for the I <3 Blogging design contest. You can now buy “Dandy(lion) Blogging” by el_square and “I Love Blogging (and Pixel Art)” by Robert Podgórski in the Infectious store as vinyl stickers for your laptop, iPod or iPhone. Congrats to the winners and all who submitted their work. Though we released comment reply via email late in the month (April 23), you’re already making great use of it. 1,029 replies to comments via email just in the final week.
Video uploads using the WordPress player are on the rise, too: 5,290 in April. If you haven’t already checked it out, head to WordPress.tv to see what your videos could look like in the WordPress player (and to learn a bit, too). If you like what you see, you can purchase the Space Upgrade to get uploading. We launched BuddyPress 1.0, a collection of plugins that transform a vanilla WordPress MU install into a social network. WIRED.com migrated its blogs to WordPress, and Intruders.tv relaunched their channels using WordPress MU. WordCamp Central was redesigned, and now has an awesome map that displays WordCamps around the world. There were six WordCamps in April: WordCamp China, WordCamp Hong Kong, WordCamp NOLA, WordCamp Tokyo, WordCamp Nigeria, and WordCamp Reno-Tahoe. Coming up in May: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Richmond, WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, WordCamp Columbus, WordCamp Ed CUNY, WordCamp Milan, and WordCamp San Francisco.

When we sat down at an Austin cafe in 2005 and wrote the stats system, Matt and I had no idea what we were getting into. He created the databases and drew the little smiley face while I wrote the code. We had milk and cookies. It was really cute. We were naïve! I swear it was Matt’s idea to store stats data as daily summaries in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is why stats days have always ended at odd hours for non-Greenwichians. But even if I seem blameless, I failed to champion your cause soon enough. It is even more my fault than Matt’s. And so today I present a gift. If you have set your blog’s time zone, your stats reports will honor that setting (in whole hours from -12 to +14). This upgrade is retroactive to the beginning of 2009. It affects all blogs using WordPress.com stats, even self-hosted blogs using the Stats plugin (version 1.4). The best part is that any time you change your blog’s time zone, the stats reports change retroactively. This works because now we store data by the hour instead of by the day. I’ve written lots of new code and Barry is bringing many new systems online to cope with the additional data, and we do it all just to give you stats in your time zone. We really do like you.