WordPress.com

WordPress was famous for its 5-minute install, but as simple as we could make it the barriers to getting a WordPress blog were still fairly high and technical. Enter WordPress.com, a more limited version of WordPress that is hosted and completely maintained. Thousands of people every day are creating blogs on the WordPress.com service, which has just begun to explore its capabilities.

Akismet

If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time, you’ve probably experienced how spammers can suck the joy out of managing your blog, and some people spend more time deleting junk than they actually do creating content. Akismet is our way to address this. It’s an adaptive, self-learning spam protection service that has proven highly effective, blocking tens of thousands of spams a day with a 0.001% miss rate.

WordPress

WordPress is an open source blogging tool used by everyone from Rosie O’Donnell to the New York Times. Development is led by Automattic troublemakers Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren, who have shepherded it from a tiny project to what is by many accounts the most popular non-hosted blog platform out there.

bbPress

Forum software is notorious for being bloated and insecure, and bbPress is pretty much everything most modern forum software is not. Sharing the same philosophical roots with WordPress, the most prominent installation of bbPress is the WP support forums themselves, which have hundreds of thousands of posts yet still are as speedy as can be. All the features you need — like tags, AJAX posting, categorization, modular user system — and nothing you don’t.