launch of Defensio anti-spam

The enigmatic Mat Balez announces the official beta release of Defensio, a new anti-spam plugin for blogs:

There’s a bunch of things to love about Defensio, including the ability to sort by “spaminess” (bubble those false positives up to the top of your spambox!), RSS feeds of your spam and ham, and individualized performance statistics. But I’ll let you read the “official” announcement to get all the juicy details.

Developed by Carl Mercier & Mat. Read the official announcement here.

I use Defensio instead of Akismet on a couple of my blogs (not this one … though I plan to change), and I do like it better – it’s got a bit of a personal feel, and you feel you have a bit of control over it, unlike Akismet that rules your blog like a dictator.

Defensio will have a hard time breaking the Akismet stranglehold on the WordPress world … Akismet doesn’t go great job but it does do a good job. Usually that’s good enough for most people not to bother installing a new plugin, unless they are setting up a new blog.

UPDATE: this looks interesting:

One of the first applications of Defensio’s spam filtering service has been the blogosphere — but it doesn’t end there. We’ve built an easy-to-use public API that is perfectly suited to handling comment traffic from any social web application that might be subject to spam