A… is also for Akismet

One of the biggest downers of the online world is spam – and for blog owners the comment form is usually the door spammers use to litter your site with exciting offers for a variety of pills and hair raising videos.

Thankfully, Automattic, a corporation that employs some of the developers behind the WordPress blogging platform, released Akismet as a free spam filtering tool. According to Wikipedia: ‘Akismet has captured over 7.8 billion spam comments and pings of September 2008′ – that’s whole lot of blushes spared…

An avatar is a graphical image used to represent a person online, most typically within a virtual world like the infamous http://www.secondlife.com, where visitors interact with each other in character. You can build a visual character with the body, clothes, behaviours, gender and name you choose. This affords those who want to relinquish the self made shackles of their real world existence, unadulterated self expression.

I like this, for teens: http://www.habbo.com/ ’tis cool

I’m not going to get technical (don’t want to embarrass myself) but AJAX is a combination of web technologies that let interactions happen on the page in front of your very eyes, rather having to load a new page. This makes interactions fast and super smooth and helps build a bit of user love for a site.

It’s used in all the well known ‘web 2.0′ applications, like social bookmarking site delicious.com and task management tool rememberthemilk.com. (if you’ve never seen remember the milk – it’s amazing! Use it and get your life sorted (if that’s not too big a promise…!)

Maybe another “A” would be aggregation, because the big powerful enabler behind social web-tools is the concept of web services offering feeds, and web pages consuming feeds.

Aggregated intimacy?