I run several blogs and I have helped design and implement numerous others. Each blog is unique and each blogger loves the ability to change themes easily. But there are several plugins that I automatically install when I set up a new blog for myself or I present to the customer when I am planning the installation of their blog.

1. Popstats - Even though for us English speakers the site being in Spanish is a slight difficulty, it is easily overcome by using Babelfish from Altavista. Popstats places a new tab on the Dashboard of the Admin menu and gives some very interesting and useful statistics about visitors to your blog.
2. WP-Postviews - Goes very well with Popstats. Enables you to display how many times a post had been viewed. You can place it in your posts.php to see info for each individual post and I also place it in the page.php to keep track of the views of the navigation pages.
3. Bunny’s Technorati Tags - Almost all blogs I run or maintain are listed in Technorati, and why not? It is one of the premier blog tracking sites in the world. Easy to use and it does help drive traffic to your blog.
4. Kimili Flash Embed - For all those who want to embed Flash animations into their blogs this is one of the easiest and quickest ways to do just that.
5. Adhesive - Does just what it sounds like it does. Let’s you enable one post to be a “sticky” post. Great if you need to get a piece of information out and want it to remain on top for a while.
6. Lightbox - Wonderful plugin! Instead of just showing an image in the browser, Lightbox dims the blog and opens up the image in the foreground. Very well done and polished. Check here for a sample.

There you have them. Six of the best and most useful plugins for Wordpress that are out there. I am sure that I probably did not mention your favorite. I’m sorry, but I wanted to boil it down to the best of the best. These are those.