John Gruber wrote an awesome Perl script called Markdown that allows blog entries to be written in the old school usenet and plain text e-mail way.
A PHPified Wordpress plugin of the same is included with Wordpress or, for the latest and greatest, look to the official home of the PHP Markdown plugin.
Note: The preceding announcement is to help me remember where I found the latest and greatest PHP Markdown plugin, you my technophobic reader, may disregard this post.