Blogs are built around comments. It’s always fun and rewarding to see your blog have a lot of comments on it. Trouble is, comments attract spam and it’s not always easy to distinguish between legitimate comments and spam.

Here’s a scenario: your post gets popular on Delicious. You get a ton of comments from “SEO BLOG TIPS”  saying “thanks for great post”. Comments like that add no value whatsoever to your blog post. Heck, they devalue it. So here’s the question: do you allow the comment or delete it?

Personally, I consider comments like that spam, but on the other hand, it does get the comment count up. So there it is. A short post, but there’s a reason for it; it’s meant to spark debate, so go on. What would you do?

(poll embedded)

With all the acquisitions lately by Automattic (the parent company responsible for WordPress), you almost have to wonder what is next.   Well, today that question was answered when Matt Mullenweg announced that Automattic has acquired PollDaddy. 

Unlike the past few acquisitions, there is a good chance most of you are already familiar with PollDaddy, who is currently considered to be the leader in internet polling.   They are the polling service of choice by most bloggers because they are easy to build, can be integrated into your blog, and allow people to vote from most feed readers (increasing the number of votes you’ll receive). 

Here is a quote from Matt’s post (linked above):

As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.

Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren’t the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.

According to their announcement, it looks like WordPress.com blogs are now fully integrated with PollDaddy and a PollDaddy WordPress plugin is now available for WordPress.org users.  The PollDaddy plugin for us is similar in that it allows you to create and manage your PollDaddy.com polls from within your WordPress blog’s administration area!

What do you guys think about this acquisition?

Today while browsing through my daily feeds, I noticed a great post over at Performancing about getting your blog organized with categories and tags.  This post got the creative juices flowing a bit and got me thinking about both categories and tags.

I make it a point to engage in discussions regularly with my fellow bloggers about a variety of topics I have an interest in, including blogging, affiliate marketing, internet real estate, etc.   One thing I always like to find out from fellow WordPress users is whether or not they’re using the tag system that was introduced in WordPress 2.3.   What I’ve found are some very diverse responses, ranging from them not understanding how tags work, to some people that actually prefer to just use tags instead of categories.  Of course in the middle are the people that are attempting to use both.

I personally use categories on all of my sites, but only choose to use tags on a few of them.   For the ones that I do use tags on, I make sure to use the Recommended Tags WordPress plugin so I don’t go overboard with the tags I use.

I’d love to get your take on this.  Do you use categories and/or tags on your blog?