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A new survey shows that 49 percent of the world’s top 100 blogs use the popular Web publishing platform.

Not a lot of people know that CNN Political Ticker, Mashable, TechCrunch, Boing Boing, ArtsBeat, Grist, Hollywood Life, and dozens more blogs use WordPress’ Web publishing platform. Not to mention several blogs for The New York Times that also use it, including The Opinionator, Paul Krugman, and Economix.

In fact, 49 percent of the top 100 blogs in the world use WordPress, according to a new survey by Pingdom. In distant second place are custom blogs with 14 percent.

“The last few years we’ve really focused on both the usability and flexibility of WordPress, which has resulted in accelerating growth in both big and small sites,” WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg told Pingdom. “I expect even higher adoption among the largest sites and blogs over the next year.”

What WordPress has done over the last year to improve usability and flexibility for bloggers includes adding a new feature called WordAds, which lets users make money by allowing ads to appear on their blogs and by creating free mobile apps that let users make text and image updates to their blogs via a mobile device.

Many of the users that once enlisted the previously popular platforms TypePad, Moveable Type, and BlogSmith have now migrated over to WordPress. Pingdom found that over the last three years WordPress has enjoyed a 32 percent increase in users.