There’s a nice post on Mashable that spammers are all over Knol already. Knol, for those of you who don’t know, is Google’s “Wikipedia killer” web application that lets users upload informative articles based on topics they’re particualrly knowledgeable about. Well, it looks like spammers are already finding ways to use Knol to their advantage.

WordPress has been, for a few years now, known as one of the most popular and easy to use tools for spammers. Splogs have been common on the web for a long time and the majority of them are powered by WordPress installs set to automatically update with scraped content from other sites online. It looks like this methodology is rapidly moving into Knol now.

A lot of the problem stems from the fact that, even so close after launch, Knol pages are rapidly ranking for search terms. WordPress is also well-known for helping rank sites quickly as well which is what draws the spammers in to using the software.

What does this mean for WordPress? Not much in the long run but at least it’ll divert some of the attention away from them as Google handles the pressure of these spammers abusing their service.

The WordPress team has released an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch this week that lets you update and work on your WordPress powered blogs. The app supports both WordPress.com, self-hosted and MU blogs.

If you run into trouble using the app there’s an FAQ that might help. Since this is an initial release there are some problems:

• Accented characters not encoded properly
• Display problems with toolbar for some iPod touch users
• Unable to add a blog using a custom uploads location
• Intermittent errors when adding blogs for some users
• Some theme previews not available for public blogs

In light of some of the errors on that list you might want to wait for an update to the app before you start using it.

The official WordPress.org theme directory is a project that has been a long time coming. Finally, over the weekend, it was launched but it seems like it might not be totally ready for primetime just yet.

There have only been 9 themes added since the directory opened several days ago. Fortunately for those nine themes, the lack of selection means they’ve been downloaded a combined 15,000 times at the time of this post. Anyone who can somehow manage to get their theme up on this directory right now is going to get some pretty incredible exposure.

Hopefully the rate of submissions and approvals ramps up soon so that the WordPress community finally has a trustworthy resource for free themes.

The 2.6 version of WordPress has been released today. There’s a handful of pretty neat features and the WordPress team released the following video to give you a look at what’s new.

If you like what you see, head over to WordPress.org and download 2.6 today.

There are a huge amount of WordPress plugins out there that offer statistics. Some of them are as simple as easily inserting Google Analytics code into your theme while others are full-blown tie-ins with WordPress.com. If you’d rather not have your stats stored on someone else’s server you might want to look at StatPress.

Once you activate StatPress the plugin begins to store visitor data for your blog in real-time. Then you can check out information on your traffic in stats using a nice dashboard style interface (seen above).