1. Akismet helps keep spam out of your blog. There are other anti-spam plugins available but this is one of the best and it is one that usually comes with your installation.
2. All In One Seo Pack is the best plugin for optimizing your Wordpress blog for search engines.
3. Similiar Posts is great for making your blog more “sticky”. Its shows posts that might be related to the current post that the reader is on.
4. Google XML Sitemaps is great for generating a google sitemap. It looks pretty good too :p.
5. ShareThis gives readers the option to submit your post to several social bookmarking sites. And best of all it doesnt clutter up the bottom of your posts or pages. It is in a simple drop down type of setup and it is even appended to your rss feed! You can see it in action on this blog.

So those are five plugins that I use and love. Let me know what you think of them. I will also be doing a couple posts about plugins for specific uses somewhere down the line.

Here are five tips to being a good commentator;

• Leave a quality comment, and stay relevant.
• Don’t spam the blogger.
• Don’t use your keywords as your name, use your real name/nickname.
• Don’t put a link to your blog in the comment.
• Don’t be arrogant, or insulting. You don’t want to be pissing off an established blogger.

In the future I will be posting a list of 20 blogs that are do follow, and another that has a list of the top commentators widget. So that will be two blogs from every pr ranking. If it proves popular then I will post a more updated one.