Here's a brief overview by Shelly of some free blogging services. 11/15/04; new reviews added in 2005, 2006.
. This is fairly nice and easy for newbies to use. You can customize the look one section at a time. I didn't like having the login directly on the page and got frustrated trying to remember which sections were which. There are a lot of good looking blogs using this service and I'm sure you can do more with the templates than I was able to figure out.
. This is similar to Blog-City with sections and login. The templates come with tagboards and some other nifty features, and you can go into the html and completely redo the code if you want. It's a nice enough service, but again, I didn't seem to be able to figure it out as fast as I'd like. I also didn't like the ad on top for the free service and it doesn't seem to have rss feeds. The email notice of updates to people's blogs is, IMO, cumbersome. I get emails re: one Blogdrive blog and it gives just a tease so I have to click on the link to read the rest. I much prefer reading my blogs in one place, ie Bloglines, though there are other blogs I read that don't publish rss feeds. The help screens are reasonably helpful.
. My favorite, hands down. You can use the templates as is and never worry about coding or you can play with the templates and completely change them. You can even get Blogger compatible templates elsewhere. By copying and pasting, making a blog for experimenting, I've learned a fair amount about html. The post writing/editing is easy and the site itself is very helpful with its Blogger Knowledge Base and news updates. There's a separate site for Blogger Status to keep abreast of problems. Being on a separate site, it's not likely to be down if Blogger itself is down. You can turn on or off the publication of the rss feeds and you can have as many blogs here on one account as you want. Has WYSIWYG and html options for entries, along with spellcheck, and previewing for changes to the template. You can moderate commenting. Also pings one of the update services.
Blogger completely revised its service, coming out of beta testing in January 2007, and now has dynamic publishing instead of static publishing. Other improvements are even more easily customizable templates for people who don't want to get into the html and the ability to limit who can read your blog.
This is a rather nice service that tries to offer the best of a lot of services. There are some nice and distinctive templates that will be easily identifiable if you don't change them and other, more generic ones that can be customized easily by changing colors. You need to look at them one at a time. A page with them all displayed would help. You can then change the font, the colors, and if you want, alter the css and html in the actual template. There are plenty of features, too. Unfortunately, there are also ads, the usual top of the blog ad that other services have. Apparently, you can also make more than one blog, but you're allowed only one account. The template I tried (and this is likely true for all) has a calendar for entries, a guest book, stats, and a links section (links can be added without going into the template). You can also add polls. There is an rss feed for the blog and the entry box allows for most of the features other services have: easy link and photo adding, text color and font changes, justification, and so on, but there are also smilies, and you can type in moods and what you're listening to. There is also a preview feature on the entries, as well as text and design mode. The service also does automatic pinging if you want. And finally, there's a support forum.If you can put up with ads, this service might work for you. And if you don't want the ads, there's a paid, premium service available. Oh, and it's British, so your blog's URL has the uk added in before the username. [review added 4/27/05]
. There are a lot of things here for blogs (tagboards, counters, polls...) as well as blog templates and hosting. The templates are decent and customizable, the blogs come with tagboards, and Bravenet is aiming for a community atmosphere. I did not like the ads on top of the page, many of which blink and some which talk. I also didn't like it putting in some links for you (you can edit them out, but still, it was rather presumptuoous) and there was actually a welcome entry added in for MY blog. I thought that was rude and saw no way to remove it. It's a nice step up for folks from AOL journals who want more functionality, but it wasn't for me. Added 4/27/05: I do like using some of Bravenet's features on my Blogger blogs, such as polls and This Day in History. Edited 8/18/06: This is no longer true. I deleted all these features due to popup ads. I have become very disappointed by this service.
DiaryLand. Limited template choices and for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to do much here other than create entries. And even that was a chore. 'Nuff said.
. I didn't try this one. From the sample journals here that I looked at, the templates look fairly nice and clean. A few had a nice retro look I like.
GreatestJournal. Looks a lot like LiveJournal. I didn't try it, but wasn't much impressed by what I saw on the site. Seems to skew rather young.
. I haven't tried this, either. The journals I sampled had basic looks, fairly clean layout.
. Community-based with a nifty Friends feature to keep up with the LiveJournals you read. This took me too long to figure out, template-wise (you can customize them, but figuring out where all the features and functions are was not intuitive to me). I persevered and got a look I like, but it was hard work. It didn't help that LJ gets cranky and when giving me fits being very slow when I was making my LJ version of Presto Speaks! The free version has limited space for links, which is the thing I most dislike about it. The icons and mood icons are fun and the commenting works well in that you can reply to individual entries or to the comments in the entries and have all sorts of subdivisions that way. It can look like a real conversation. There's a nice variety of templates, once you figure out how they work. And you can have rss feeds here, too. Previews and spellcheck for entries. Added 8/18/06: Site redesign, bug fixes, and the like have improved this service. A paid account has many nice features, including the ability to create your own rss feeds for LJ, the ability to have your own communities, extra icons/userpics, and full customization of the templates. There is now a plus service where you get extra features over the free service along with ads.
. Another community-based service, with nearly 7,000 blogs now. When I tried to sample some, I got popups and couldn't go back. I didn't try making a blog because the site itself annoyed me.
. The site looked interesting, but I didn't try making a blog. This looks like a fairly serious site, for business blogs more than fun personal ones.
Upsaid: Fee-based service, currently $2/month with free trial. Has an online demo, a detailed control panel that has hard-to-read light blue text on white. Has some decent readymade templates (some include colored scrollbars), allows direct editing of the templates, and has features that include polls, calendars, extra pages, entry categories, message boards, guest books, hit counters, and file hosting.
This is a Six Apart blogging service, started in 2006 and slowly being rolled out to the general public. Six Apart owns LiveJournal (LJ). This is a rather busy looking site and I wish they'd redesign it for a cleaner look. The nav bar is nice and makes it easy to move around and post. There are a lot of templates to choose from, with more being added. There are features from LJ, such as the friends list, here called "neighborhood." You can add modules to the sidebar for photos, vids, audio, books you're reading or own, etc. Adding to these modules and creating collections is easy, giving this the feel of a full webpage, something similar to Yahoo 360's web page with blog concept that I've also played with but haven't really found a reason to use. VOX seems geared for the rest of the world, those people not yet blogging because they're technophobes. As one early bit of publicity for it, when it had a different name, put it, paraphrased: Blogging your mother can do.
Windows Live Spaces. This review is from when it was MSN Spaces. Given I've reviewed some of the other free blogging services, I suppose I should comment on this new one. I haven't tried it, but I looked at some of the blogs and they seem somewhat blah. There are tabs for profile and photos and lists and music, but the layout of the ones I looked at were drearily the same. But mostly, I read some disturbing things on Boing Boing re: censorship and similar issues. From looking at some of the blogs, there seem to be issues of hyperlinks in the entries, as in they don't look like links. My first impression is that msn is going for a similar feel that AOL is: a nice, basic, family-oriented blogging community with limited options re: customizing the blogs, one that is easy to use for people who simply want to post thoughts and pictures.
WordPress.com, aka WordPress Lite. A free online blogging service using the dashboard features WordPress is famous for and which the new beta version of Blogger is now direct competition. Unlike Blogger, javascript isn't allowed here. There are a limited but nice, and slowly growing collection of templates with limited customization allowed. A big improvement was allowing customized headers. You can add official modules to the sidebar, but as of now (Aug. 2006), you can't change the default fonts and colors. It took me a while to figure out the dashboard navigation as it isn't as intuitive as I'd been led to believe or as easy to figure otu as Blogger, but it's a nice service and a way to get a feel for WordPress.
Xanga. This skewed very young to me and I didn't try it. The templates looked fine, but most of the blogs I sampled had tiny, light-colored text. Many had a lot packed on the screens. I've found Xanga blogs hard to read and wasn't interested in joining what looks like a fairly youngcommunity of bloggers who wouldn't get the concept of aging eyes.
I also came across another service today called BlogStudio, which didn't impress me at all from the sample blogs I looked at.
2/19/05:BlogSpirit is another new, free blogging service, and it looks promising. I haven't tried it yet, but the blogs I checked out had a nice, clean look.
WordPress.com