Popular Blogging Programs / Platforms

You may already know that within each type of blog hosting, there are several and different types of "blogging platform". You may also have probably heard about some of them and even may have tried some of them already.

Blogger
Blogger is a FREE hosted blogging tool by Google that has been around for a long time and is very easy to use. Many people make personal blogs on this site and it only takes about 10 minutes to set up your first blog. They have a nice selection of templates but Blogger doesn’t allow for a lot of customization. - http://www.blogger.com/

Wordpress
Wordpress is both hosted and self hosted, depending on what your needs are. Wordpress is free and is easy to setup and use. There are hundreds of plugins to extend functionality in different areas. This is by far one of the most popular options around today. Here is a list of some popular blogging platforms which bloggers can install on their own servers:

Here is a list of some popular blogging services, which need no installation.

Blog.com
Open Diary
Windows Live Spaces
Yahoo
LiveJournal
Xanga
Grey Matter (free + opensource)
Open Journal (free)

Those of you who have a bit of technical streak in them, do try and experiment with the Wordpress platform as well.

You have to decide for yourself which platform you think will meet all of your needs the best. I have taken "BLOGGER.COM" as I am very comfortable with this "blogging platform" and have a lot of blogs running using blogger.