Another year is upon us and we are all looking to upgrade and update our blogs. So when it comes to wordpress, what plugins will make your blog stand out and which are best?After blogging for over 2 years, and writing a few plugins myself, here is my list of the best of the best wordpress plugins. 15 Top notchwordpress plugins, guaranteed to make your blog if anything, a little nicer than it was before.

Show Top Commenters - A great way to get your readers more enthusiastic and develop more discussions, by displaying their name & number of comments they have left recently to your sidebar.

Akismet - Intelligently blocks spam comments. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.

Bad Behavior - prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator - creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.

SEO Title Tag - Optimize your wordpress title tags for search engines. Enabling you to edit the title tags of posts, pages, category pages, tag pages etc.

Related Posts - Will show a list of posts related to keywords of your choosing in current posts. A nifty plugin to bring back older posts.

WP-Notable - displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking (Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Facebook, Youtube, etc.) and networking sites.

WordPress.com Stats - Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

AdSense-Deluxe - is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.

Global Translator - Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.

Feedburner Feedsmith - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

InstantUpgrade - A plugin that will upgrade your version of Wordpress to the most recent version (or any other version) with a click of the mouse! If you hate upgrading Wordpress, this plugin is for you.

Gregarious- A social bookmarking plugin that integrates the Share This plugin, the Digg API, and a slick AJAX interface. Gregarious is so easy to setup, it requires no template edits!

404 Notifier - This plugin allows you to see how much of your traffic is getting 404′d and what page(s) they are trying to access. You can retrieve this data via an RSS feed or email.

Manage Multiple Blogs - Otherwise known as MMB, this plugin allows you to manage all your wordpress blogs from one session, eliminating the need for 500 tabs and logging in to each admin panel repetitively. A definite must for any blog owner who is trying to administer more than 5 blogs.