I argued recently that Wordpress is the most innovative open source platform, without being particularly specific.

Yesterday I was talking to Chris Dalby about the Microsoft .NET-based Community Server 2007, which calls itself The World’s Leading Platform for Creating Vibrant Online communities. Obviously the claim is wrong- the world’s leading is of course WordPress.

Where am I going with this? Well Chris has recently decided that Wordpress is his lead platform, and he is a Microsoft-head. But that’s not the innovation point. He told me that Community Server now offered Akismet to prevent blog spam. Akismet is from the chaps at Automattic, which is the company formed to allow the Wordpress developers to make a living. Akismet is stone cold the best anti blog spam platform out there. Here is one happy user, Elsua:

“Oh My.. I knew there was a reason why I loved Akismet from the very first beginning. Just passed the 200.000 spam comments in elsua.net! WOW”

RedMonk has similar feelings about the platform. If you’re going to use a blog as a primary community communications and research platform you really don’t want a bunch of horrible rascist and sexist blog spam all over the place. Akismet, in conjunction with Bad Behaviour is the real blog spam killer.

Yet another reason to adopt, or migrate to, WordPress, even though Akismet is finding its way to other platforms. Akismet is based on an invention, but is innovation because its widely deployed. It came out of the open source community. I have experience of proprietary blogging platforms Blogger and MoveableType and their protections are nowhere near as good. So there you have it - open source innovation, which is something some people claim is impossible.