[...] Mullenweg thinks he has come up with a better approach. He got serious about fighting spam, he says, when his mother started to blog. “I went through the last hundred or so people who had pinged WordPress with comments and trackbacks, and it was all spam,” he says. “Mortgages and Viagra, pills and porn.”

Embarrassed and revolted, Mullenweg decided to fight back. In his view, even the smartest companies – the Six Aparts and Technoratis – represent single points of failure, something that spammers can target and outwit. But the bad guys, Mullenweg says, can’t beat the “collective, distributed intelligence” of the blogosphere. When bloggers install his Akismet software, it submits all comments and trackbacks to a Web service that tests them for spamminess, quarantines the bogus ones, and posts the rest. If any of those are spam, bloggers report them to Akismet, which uses the feedback to improve its filter. Almost 300,000 bloggers use the software, Mullenweg says, and their input improves the filter every day. “Essentially what we’re doing is working together. All the kids that got hit by bullies in school have discovered there’s strength in numbers. I like to believe that, anyway.” [...]

Midas Oracle used the Askimet plugin for a short period of time, but I decided to shut down the automatic trackbacks and free comments in favor of compulsory, manual, registrations.