Regular readers will know that I'm a fan of WordPress, and in fact I use it on all my blogs.

With WordPress 2.0 came the Akismet plug-in, designed to catch and prevent spam from making it to your comments and ergo your blog posts. It is exceedingly effective - on just one of my sites, I trap about 300-400 comments a day, and over 6,500 over the course of the last three months.

Akismet is a network enabled verification/checking system that shares information about marked spam with a central server. As well as improving the quality of the spam filter, it also means that they can get spam statistics for all of the Akismet enabled sites that use the service.