An attempt at corrupting David Welsh.

1. The Dashboard: I’ve used Blogger, Typepad and LiveJournal in the past and WordPress has my favorite “Welcome” screen, putting several frequently-used blog-administration tools on the first screen you see. My favorite part is how the Dashboard gives you a summarized Technorati search, telling you who’s linking to you (well, dependant on Technorati catching it) when you log in. The Dashboard also publishes a feed for the WordPress development blog and the very active Planet Wordpress which keeps me up-to-date on the latest developments. Most blogging tools have that kind “here’s what’s new” information on their welcome pages, but the blog format makes these pages more active and exciting.
2. Akismet spam protection: WordPress’ use of Akismet makes spam protection very easy to catch spam without making site visitors (or myself) jump through a number of inconvenient hoops. Combined with some simple settings for comments, WordPress has been the simplest and most effective system for preventing spam.
3. Pingback support: Pingbacks are like trackbacks, except they automatically happen whenever you link to another blog that supports pingbacks. While I prefer how they function (though, since I tend to link to others a lot, I sometimes worry about looking like a pingback spammer) it also seems to be a technology with some spam controls built-in. At the least, it’s given me a way to stop worrying about trackback spam.
4. Comments RSS feeds: I love the comments feeds on other WordPress sites (which I think has made some of my favorite blogs into really great discussion communities) but it’s also very useful for myself since, by putting my comments feed into my Bloglines account, I can quickly get alerted to newly-submitted comments.
5. Flexibility: Between the user-created plugins and WordPress’ use of CSS, users who prefer to be more hands-on and users who are happy using publicly available tools have plenty of options to personalize their space. WordPress is pretty flexible in what you can do with it, but is also very flexible in how much work you need to devote to maintenance.
6. Subcategories: I think I just have a personality that just likes categorizing things for easier retrieval later on, so I love the idea of blog posts with categories. WordPress, however, also introduces sub-categories that make it even easier to organize my posts.