Blog Hosts:

Blogger:

http://www.blogger.com

Blogger was launched in 1999 by Pyra Labs, and was one of the first blog publishing tools and greatly helped to popularize the phenomenon while positioning itself as the industry leader. Early success led to Google acquiring Pyra in 2003. With Google's money and resources behind it, many of the features that were only available to paying bloggers became offered for free.

Blogger is often credited as one of the major reasons for blogging's popularity, and for good reason. Blogger is the epitomy of easy to use while offering a huge feature set for users of all levels. Comprehensive how-to's and help pages, moderator capabilities for group blogs, posting via Word documents, Blogger has it all. With new features being added all the time, I highly recommend Blogger to everyone. From the beginning first timer, to the person who has been blogging for years. If you're looking for a free blog, go to Blogger!

By default, all blogger blogs are hosted on http://www.blogspot.com

BloggerBot: When Google purchased Picasa in 2004, it allowed Blogger to incorporate photo sharing with the utility Hello. Featuring BloggerBot, Hello allows you to post pictures to your blog, as well as manage and search through the ones on your PC. This is really useful for photoblogs, which we'll get to later.

BlogThis!: This is a great, clever little tool. When you add this option, you'll get a BlogThis! button on your web browser's links bar. When you find something you find interesting or cool or whatever, you press it. The link will automatically appear in a mini-Blogger window, and you can add your comments then press Publish Post. The new post will go directly to your blog, and you never have to go to the Blogger website.

Word verification: By turning on this option, users can cut down on comment spam. This is a great tool, if you don't activate it, you're going to get a ton of great new comments. Okay, so maybe they wont be great, but you'll DEFINITELY get a ton of them! It's ridiculously annoying. A word verification keeps malicious software from being able to post rude or random comments to your blog automatically. It's a great feature to have.

TypePad:

http://www.typepad.com

TypePad is the hosted alternative to Six Apart's server-side software Moveable Type. TypePad has attracted quite a following with it's smooth interface, rich features, and well-designed templates.

It comes with a full set of features, and will help you set up your photo albums, and automatically generates thumbnails and individual display pages.

TypePad unfortunately isn't free, so I don't suggest it for the beginner. I only suggest paid sites to those who know what they're getting into, and who are sure they'll make use of the features that require money. You can try it out for 30 days with their trial before choosing one of three membership levels. There is basic for $4.95/month, Plus for $8.95/month, and Pro for $14.95/month.

Basic:

Gives you one web-log with unlimited photo albums, category and date archives, access to a library of pre-designed templates, as well as the ability to post by email, phone, or mobile-device.

Plus and Pro: These give you the ability to host multiple web-logs and also give you access to a variety of extra tools.

They also have a Premium version now for $29.95 a month, and this is what TypePad has to say about it:

For serious bloggers who want even more. All of the control of Pro, with three times the storage and double the bandwidth. Plus, access to the TypePad Insider forum and special TypePad Insider web-events.

TrackBack: Gives you a list of those who have placed a link to your blog on theirs, and also gives you some information as to the content on the blog's linking to yours.

TypeLists: You put in your favorite movies and music, and TypePad displays a thumbnail and a link from Amazon.com in your sidebar.

QuickPost: This is kind of like Blogger's BlogThis! button, QuickPost puts a icon in your web browser's links bar, allowing you to quickly post about a newly discovered website.

LiveJournal

http://www.livejournal.com

Live Journal was created in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his friends up to date. Since its creation, LiveJournal has grown in a big way into a hugely popular blog host and online community. In January 2005 it was purchased by Six Apart, the owner of TypePad and Moveable Type.

LiveJournal is open source, meaning that if you have the knowledge, you can tack extra fetatures on as you see fit.

LiveJournal has a very strong sense of community, making it easy for you to join and organize groups with other members, and it also has a "friends" feature. You add people to your "friends" and it alerts you when those friends post to their blogs.

The website is well organized, and allows you to search for people by region or subject.

To-do lists let you file tasks and projects, and it also has a built in password protection feature so that you can choose whether you'll display posts to everyone, to specific groups, or to no one but yourself.

Paid LiveJournal accounts cost $3 a month, $15 for six months, or $19.95 for a year. With a paid subscription you get an emaila ccount, a personalized domain name (beautifullyhaunted.livejournal.com instead of http://www.livejournal.com/users/beautifullyhaunted) for example.

You also get advanced template customization, embedded poll tools with automatically tabulated votes, and multiple user profiles. You also get a site-tracking service that shows you how many visitors you have (and where they've come from) and ScrapBook, LiveJournal's photo hosting service.

Text Messaging: LiveJournal offers a unique texting service to its paying customers. Once you've set it up

Xanga

http://www.xanga.com

Xanga is a powerful community and social networking tool. It's one of the most popular blog hosts for teenagers and young adults. A free Xanga blog comes enabled with comments, a guestbook, and pages for entertainment reviews. It even has a events page. To encourage interaction among it's users, Xanga makes it extremely easy to join blogrings and to subscribe to other users blogs. Along with comments, users can award "eProps" to posts they particularly like.

Xanga Premium starts at $4 per month and gives you more powerful versions of the tools basic users have. It also gives you additional design and customization options. Premium members can also download a complete copy of their blog in case they want to store it somewhere other than Xanga's servers.

XTools: This is just like Blogger's BlogThis! and TypePad's QuickPost. Add this "bookmarklet" to your browser's links bar and you can use most of Xanga's editing tools without having to log in via the Xanga homepage.