Home About Contact Podcasts Writer River WordPress Consulting

Matt Mullenweg Explains Genius of Akismet and Appeal of Fast Development Cycles

February 22nd, 2007 | Posted in Recom. Podcasts, WordPress |

I listened to an awesome podcast today. Brian Oberkirch from Edgework talks with Matt Mullenweg about WordPress. Of course I love WordPress so it was great to hear from Matt, the WordPress lead. Matt said a few things about Akismet and accelerated development cycles that were interesting.

matt mullenwegAkismet, the spam-blocking software packaged with WordPress and produced by Automattic (the company behind the open-source WordPress application), is really an ingenius bit of software. Every time you mark a comment as spam in your blog, Akismet updates a central directory that keeps track of IP addresses that send SPAM. As more users delete spam from their blogs, Akismet gets smarter. It’s a case of building applications powered by the whole Web 2.0 idea, where users provide the brains of the application.

By the way, on the topic of Spam, WordPress has the upper hand on this issue. Without Akismet, you’d get 50-100 spam comments a day on your blog. Akismet knocks it down to 1-2. Interestingly, Matt said spammers target high-ranking blogs. If your blog is rarely updated or visited, you may not see much spam — such as the following in your moderation queue:

spam

You can draw analogies between Akismet and Google in the way they function. Google is a powerful search engine because it also compiles information from users. Every time you link to another page, your link feeds into Google’s brain to tell it the page is cool. The more links that point to a certain page, the higher the rank for that page. The highest ranked pages that match your keywords appear on the first page of Google’s search returns. So Google is also a Web 2.0 application.

Matt also talked about accelerated development cycles, explaining that much of the appeal of WordPress is that it’s constantly being developed. WordPress is moving forward at a fast pace — people really like that. In contrast, you may be using another blogging platform for a year and hardly see any change. People dislike stagnant software. This is why Matt intends to release the next version of WordPress 2.2 within 90 days after releasing version 2.1.

I completely agree with Matt on accelerated development cycles. Knowing that an application is keeping up step with the rapidly expanding pace of today’s technology is comforting. You know that the tool you’re using won’t be outdated in a few years. You can certainly draw a lot of parallels to RoboHelp and Flare about this.

RSS Subscribe


Related Posts


Comments

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

19 Responses to “Matt Mullenweg Explains Genius of Akismet and Appeal of Fast Development Cycles”

  1. Since switching to WordPress from Blogger about 3 months ago Akismet has stopped 219 spams from reaching my comment page and, inconceivably, is batting 1.000. Perhaps blog spam is more obvious than email spam, or perhaps that common repository of spammer IP addresses does the trick, but Akismet is the single most effective spam filter I’ve ever used. I’m just in awe. Zero false positives, zero spams missed.

    Nothing but kudos to the Akismet team.

  2. That’s nice to hear. I still get a few spam comments every day. Sometimes (rarely) Akismet goes down for a few hours, and then I get blanketed by spam. I heard someone that 90% of the world’s spam comes from about 10 individuals. I can’t remember where I heard that, but it’s crazy if it’s true.

  3. Three cheers for Akismet from another happy user.

  4. [...] of the things people like most about WordPress is that its in active development. Releases come out four times a year. With every release, users [...]

  5. [...] I’d Rather Be Writing » Matt Mullenweg Explains Genius of Akismet and Appeal of Fast Dev… Pingback on Feb 22nd, 2007 “[...] listened to an awesome podcast today. Brian Oberkirch from [...]

  6. Thank you for this article. I will let others know about this site so then can learn as well

  7. Spamming is really annoying and I get a lot too. Any solution to it?

    Jae Hyun Lees last blog post..Several Pictures of Yonsei Univ.

  8. Thanks for the reference to Anarchy Media Player! I’ll let you know how this works for us.

    çok güzel hareketler bunlars last blog post..mumya geri döndü

  9. I think your review(s) pretty much nailed it. Joomla is very powerful, free, and has a steep learning curve. As a web designer, I don’t design “static sites” anymore, I do everything with Joomla.

    bkm mutfaks last blog post..mumya geri döndü

  10. More knowledge need need

  11. As a web designer, I don’t design “static sites” anymore, I do everything with Wordpress

    iyinet webmaster forumu 2008 seo yarışmasıs last blog post..iyinet seo 2. Puanlama Açıklandı

  12. thanks

  13. thanks

  14. thanx

  15. thanks man

    lidas last blog post..Lida’ nın yan etkisi varmı ?

  16. First of all congratulation for such a great site. I learned a lot reading article here today. I will make sure i visit this site once a day so i can learn more.

  17. thanks

  18. The best movie ever! I didn’t know anything up until today about it, when I went to see it. It hit home for me

  19. Thanks You

Leave a Reply