The Apple iMac is the stuff that dreams are made of. When it was released in 2000 (iMacs were released in 1998, but the current ’slim’ form was introduced in 2002), it was hailed as the best innovation seen in the recent past, and won many accolades for the design innovation.
Akismet has for long, been a worthy dominating force in the anti-spam section of WordPress plugins (and some other platforms like bbPress), but many bloggers have noticed that the accuracy of Akismet has dropped sharply in the last few days.
Coded by Matt Mullenweg, also the co-founder of WordPress, Akismet was considered the gold standard in anti-spam plugins, has been praised by top bloggers, and blocked millions of spam comments on various sites. Akismet is also now bundled along with the default install of WordPress.
Blogging echo chamber refers to the phenomena of echoing news, events etc. (usually time-sensitive content) that other blogs have written. This creates a virtual echo chamber, where you read similar posts everywhere you go.
Examples of these include similar posts when Microsoft first announced its intent to acquire Yahoo. Every other blog you visit would be flooded with rumours, predictions and news of the acquisition attempt.
Akismet is an anti-spam plugin for WordPress, developed by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. It uses the community aspect to recognize and weed out spam. ‘Community aspect’ here refers to the fact that Akismet learns about spam by collecting data of comments that have been marked as spam.
Akismet has been much praised, and is included with the default WordPress core files. Popular blogs have had millions of spam comments blocked by Akismet (TechCrunch, for example), and bloggers have invariably praised Akimet.
AdSense allows custom styling and various other tidbits for premium publishers who get enormous amount of traffic every month. Most large portals are premium publishers and get such advantages.
However, I recently noticed custom ads on Digital Inspiration, written by Amit Aggarwal, a popular problogger from India. His blogs (on WordPress and previously on Blogspot) receives ~2 million hits per month, and sports custom AdSense units. What caught my fancy was that the traffic levels to his blog are not large enough for a premium account.