If you have a blog and you’re getting hammered with trackback spam or comment spam, you need Akismet. Now.

Trackback and comment spam is a huge problem. It’s been a hassle for me for a long time, though it ebbs and flows. About two months ago, a relentless new wave of spam started hitting this blog, to the tune of hundreds of bogus posts per day.

I installed the Akismet plugin for WordPress recently. Bogus posts since then? Zero. Zilch. Zip. Nada.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything Web-related that’s so simple and works so well.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re blogging, personally or corporately, you need to take a close look at Akismet. Now.

This is an interesting article from yesterday’s New York Times about political URLs. The gold rush of domain squatting may be long over, but at least one guy (check out the third-from-last paragraph in the article) is making some smart beer money.

Takeaway for marketers: Are you thinking ahead and nailing down all the relevant URLs for your growing company or marketing efforts?

Just over 92% of the visitors to AndrewSullivan.com live in the U.S. Large city dwellers make up 46% of Andrew’s audience, 85.2% are male, 52.6% are married, 50% have a graduate degree and 31.7% describe themselves as politically conservative while 15.6% are independents.

When it comes to PBS podcasts, 63.8% of listeners find out about them through iTunes and 84.7% use iTunes to download them. Washington Week is the most compelling, with 62% of listeners always listening all the way through. Just over 52% have recommended PBS podcasts to friends and family.

More than half of business bloggers, 55.7% to be precise, have received a qualified lead from their blogs, with 45.9% of those bloggers closing business. Nearly 20% of bloggers say that more than 15% of their new business comes from their blog.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of information you’ll find through this Google search that reveals detailed results of nearly 800 surveys created with the popular Survey Monkey software.

This is, of course, a huge problem if your survey requests personal information, includes open-ended questions that might prompt the volunteering of personal information or if you believe that the results themselves constitute information that’s sensitive and confidential for your company.

Here’s the good news: You can prevent this.

If you’re using SurveyMonkey, be sure to set your survey’s results-sharing status to disabled, even if you have no intention of sending anyone the link to your results. This will result in a “survey is closed” message being delivered to anyone who tries to access your results summary link.

Takeaway for marketers: Don’t forget: On the Web, virtually everything is accessible somewhere somehow by somebody. Make sure you have a good relationship with your engineering department to keep those important holes plugged as tightly as possible whenever you (or they) discover them.

This article in the Washington Post is required reading, especially if you’re involved in marketing to kids online.

The upshot: The MySpace crowd is moving to Facebook. This will probably speed up the exodus.

And guess what: As soon as you gear up that six-figure initiative to develop a partnership with Facebook? Those kids will have moved elsewhere.

Takeaway for marketers: The online audience is like a school of fish. They dart this way and that en masse, and dropping your bait into their midst is often the surest way to drive them away. Cast your net with care.

The other day, WOMMA (the Word of Mouth Marketing Association) released the “WOMMA Ethics Assessment Tool, which helps marketers identify and eliminate unethical word of mouth marketing tactics before they are implemented.” Read the press release here and the 20 assessment questions here.

The 20 questions are good, but I particularly like this “extra measure of assurance” that states, “Is there anything about this campaign that we would be embarrassed to discuss publicly?”

That’s a great litmus test. It speaks not only to ethical issues, but also to issues of transparency. Because in this hyper-networked world in which we live, the notion of trying to keep two sets of informational books — one that the public gets to see and one that only the company insiders see — is a practical impossibility.

Takeaway for marketers: Ethics matter, probably more to your customers than to your company. Which is why they should matter more to your company.