Last week, I covered some of what it takes to create a free blog on WordPress.com, today I will present similar information about how to set up and run a free blog using Blogger. This blogging platform is from Google, and as such allows for some simple integration with any number of other Google services. This may be of some use for you if you have a lot of photos on your Picasa web albums (which you would likely to blog…).

I think that Blogger may be even easier to start than the WordPress.com free blogs (and that is saying a lot!). If you already have a Gmail e-mail address, you are already halfway there. You just need to go to Blogger and start your blog. Here is a video which will cover some of these simple details:

While this service allows you to blog very simply and the set up is almost nonexistent, there are some things are new blogger will notice. When compared to the WordPress blog, Blogger seems a bit ‘sparse’; there are fewer things you can do to change how your blog looks, on the other hand, Blogger allows for more options as far as content is concerned. For instance, you can easily add in your own podcast to a Blogger blog, whereas a WordPress.com free blog doesn’t easily allow for this.

In any case, after I have also set up a Windows Live Spaces blog, I will give you my review of how these three free blogging sites compare.

Getting back to Blogger, there are some other things to consider, Blogger has the largest community of bloggers, WordPress is in second place…and Windows Live Spaces is on my list because hotmail or .msn e-mail accounts are so common…not this new blogging platform…

One of the major advantages of using a Blogger blog as a platform for your online musings is that because it is so simple, it frees you to focus on the content instead of the form. This would be another way to look at some of the obvious differences between this platform and WordPress.com (i.e. the prettier one…). By and large, if you are running a ‘free’ blog, you probably aren’t going to be amazing many people with the look of your blog anyway.

While Blogger may be simple to run…if only from the standpoint of simply writing and posting to your blog, there are some things which you can do to add other kinds of content to it. Tomorrow I will cover how to add some widgets to your blog, how to get rid of the ‘blogger bar’ at the head of your Blogger, and a few things you can do to customize your theme…

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