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If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help.

When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.

If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.

Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern monitoring, the Akismet team can easily track the source of these parasite spammers and notify the site’s owner, but there’s little they can do if they can’t get in touch with you. Since contact forms can break without warning, the Akismet team recommends that you provide a traditional abuse@yourdomain email address. If you don’t want to make this email address public, at least contact Akismet and have it placed on file.

Are you using Akismet on your social network or online publishing service? With so many options available, why not try it today? Parasite spam can hit almost any site driven by user content, so don’t forget to offer your contact information to the Akismet team.

If you know of someone, or are yourself a blogger on Vox, you should know already that Six Apart has announced plans for closing the service. Users have until the 30th of September to get their data our of Vox and into other blogging and/or CMS platforms if they so choose.

Mark Jaquith has a great suggestion on how to Import a Vox blog into WordPress or almost anything else. In short, he suggests that you import your Vox blog into a vanilla WordPress.com blog and then export it out as a WordPress export file. Then you actually have a bunch of choices of what to do with your blog. PS: Be sure to mark your WordPress.com blog as private before importing if you do not intend to make that your final destination.

October 15th is less than two months away and Change.org wants you to vote on this year’s Blog Action Day topic. Currently, the selection includes the following topics, but they will continue to take suggestions until the poll closes.

Water: The UN recently declared water to be a human right, but millions around the world still lack even the most basic access, causing widespread disease and the possibility of military conflict over access to clean water.

Human Trafficking: From prostitution to forced labor, more than 27 million people are modern-day slaves, making human trafficking one of the most overlooked man-made tragedies in the world.

Women: The most discriminated against group in the world isn’t a minority: it’s women. From inequality in schooling to reduced economic opportunities, women face a disproportionate degree of adversity all over the world.

Sustainable Food: Industrial agriculture has overtaken the world’s food supply – creating obesity in the developed world and spreading genetically modified crops and oftentimes undercutting local farmers in the developing world.

Hunger: While many of us may take healthy, nutritious food for granted, more than 1 billion people around the world see it as an unattainable luxury.

Oceans: Overfishing and pollution have decimated untold species of fish and other ocean life over the past few decades, and recent oil spills have shown how vulnerable aquatic life is to man-made disasters.

Last year, over 31,000 posts were made from across the globe on the topic of climate change, so vote for your favorite topic and plan to make yourself a part of this monumental event.

I was thrilled by the concept of a day for worldwide blog-powered reflection when the first Blog Action Day was announced in 2007, and I participated with Save the Environment for Free.  Unfortunately, I missed the last two, but I’m already thinking of some great posts for all of the potential topics. Have you participated in any past Blog Action Days, and are you planning to participate in this year’s Blog Action Day?

Are you gripping the edge of your seat in anticipation of the upcoming WordPress mobile app releases? Do you have an insatiable desire to follow the development teams’ every move? Well, you’re in luck!

The WordPress mobile app teams will be sharing the latest news, status updates, beta team instructions, and random quips in 140 characters or less via Twitter. Follow the Android team, the BlackBerry team, the iOS team, all three, or maybe just two. Even if you don’t have a Twitter account, you can use Twitter’s new Fast Follow feature to have the latest news from the mobile app teams sent straight to your phone (standard text messaging rates apply).

The development teams behind the WordPress apps for Android, BlackBerry, and iOS are seeking feedback for their upcoming releases.

The blog posts linked to above include instructions on how to contribute to each mobile app. All three mobile app teams are looking for feedback on the current release and beta testers for future releases.

As a user of the WordPress app on my iPhone, I can attest that the app has grown tremendously in its usefulness since it premiered, mostly due to comments from users like us. Let’s do whatever we can to help the mobile app teams make these upcoming releases the best yet!

Thesis has officially adopted a split GPL license, putting an end to the explosive debate between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Thesis developer Chris Pearson which launched a community-wide discussion on the GPL and WordPress themes.

To clarify the split GPL license, Chris Pearson adds, “the PHP is GPLv2 and the CSS, JS, and images are proprietary.” Specifically, this means that Thesis no longer violates the GPL of WordPress and the several plugins that Thesis was based on. Matt Mullenweg was thrilled to hear the news, replying with, “Now, back to work. This has taken a lot of my time over the past few days and was going to consume more if it went forward.”

It is unknown if this will have any affect on Mr. Pearson’s business.  While the split GPL license now allows the core of Thesis be redistributed by a third-party either free or for a fee, the rest of Thesis is still protected and would therefore require extensive work to redistribute anything like it.  In addition to the proprietary portions of Thesis, Mr. Mullenweg mentioned in the original debate that Thesis is “more than just a code and a theme; it is the forums, the support, the community, and all the things around it that make it valuable. That is not something that someone in another country selling it for half-price is going to be able to duplicate because they don’t have you.”

[EDIT] Peter Westwood, one of the lead devs, in a comment below suggests against the use of this plugin because of the complexities of the setup process that might be ignored if users install and enable this plugin without following the steps. He points users to the Codex article that explains the setup. If the preliminary setup is that complex, code could be written to understand, walk people through and then validate those setup steps in the future. I am pretty sure the core is going to get more mature about this. So this is just the first step.

Enable Multisite in WordPress 3.0 With One Click!: Sarah Gooding from WPMU.org notifies us of a plugin (which can be downloaded from the WordPress Repository) that will enable MultiSite functionality on your WordPress blog with just one click. Installation for the Enable MultiSite plugin seems relatively simple and the process to enable the functionality is also easy. In case you were not aware of the new MultiSite feature in WordPress 3.0, our very own Klint Finley put together a walkthrough of the feature for you recently.Anyone blogging with MultiSite yet?

Disclosure: The linked blog is run by and advertiser on Weblog Tools Collection

Phone Your Blog — WordPress.com: Matt wrote a post yesterday about a new feature WordPress.com is testing using which a blogger on WordPress.com could get it set up, receive a special number and code and then call in to make a post. Interesting concept indeed. This is made possible by Twilio. Not yet available for self hosted WordPress blogs.

Phone Your Blog — WordPress.com: Matt wrote a post yesterday about a new feature WordPress.com is testing using which a blogger on WordPress.com could get it set up, receive a special number and code and then call in to make a post. Interesting concept indeed. This is made possible by Twilio. Not yet available for self hosted WordPress blogs.

As of yesterday, WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is out of beta and ready to be installed! There is a lot to look forward to in this point oh version, including a whole bunch of new features, a whole new default theme called Twenty Ten, integration of WordPress MU and multiple blogs into WordPress (boy that seems like such a huge goal from just a few years ago to compete with MT) and a whole slew of bugfixes. The WordPress produced video is embedded below. This is a big one and I am really looking forward to having our team dive into the nitty gritty of this release as soon as possible.

Six Revisions has an ultimate guide to the new features in WordPress 3.0, while Rohand Mehta tells us of the 10 features that he is looking forward to in WordPress 3.0. I also really appreciated Navjot’s list of Template Changes/Tags for WordPress 3.0

What other WordPress 3.0 resources are you reading to catch up?