blogging, the taste test!

For today, I can finally take a little time to evaluate and compare the free blogs I have set up in the last week. I have sites at WordPress.com, Blogger, and Windows Live Spaces. TO make this ‘taste test’ as fair as possible, I posted to all three blogs using the same software (Windows Live Writer), and posted identical posts to all three sites. Here are the contenders:

For post #1, I merely added a text post, where I did a little typing, added a few changes to the text characteristics (Bold, Italic, etc.), and changed the fonts a little. Finally I also created bulleted and numbered lists. For these posts I also segmented them (which only shows you the first paragraph or so… in order to save a little space on the blog), this was interesting in that on both the WordPress.com and Blogger blogs this worked quite well, but the Windows Live Spaces blog doesn’t seem to support this level of complexity (as in not very much complexity…).

For post #2, I added in a few photos to a bit of text, to see how they formatted. I should mention that with regard to beginning as a blogger, most people’s beginner blogs are not that focused on typesetting and formatting, and in this case all three blog s did well enough…for beginner blogs, and for posts written by people like me who don’t sweat the details that much…

For post #3 I added a YouTube video and a Bing Map. I should mention here that especially when using Windows Live Writer, adding in YouTube videos is usually quite simple. On the other hand, if you were to find an interesting video on a very obscure site, your chances of getting into your blog start to become more and more problematic. With this said, the videos came up well enough. And the Bong Map (of the coffee shop where I am posting this blog) also works well enough. I usually am partial to Google Maps, but since Windows Live Writer is a WINDOWS program, it defaults to Bing (a bit of nepotism here…).

So, with these three blog posts on these three blog sot give you a chance to determine which of these sites would best match your needs. I would also add in that as far as posting to a blog goes, the WordPress.com blog uploaded the quickest, with Blogger a little behind, but the Windows Live Spaces blog lagged behind the first two but quite a bit. If you add this to the fact that the Windows Live Spaces blog also doesn’t even allow for some pretty basic formatting conventions (at least for blogging), I can see which of these three blogs is in last place.

This isn’t that much of a surprise in that I have never actually seen a Windows Live Spaces blog out in the wild. There are some Microsoft related blogs which use this platform and hosting, but for those who blog and want to reach any sort of audience…I don’t see this platform as giving you a fair chance. However, if you want to create a site where you can share photos and videos with family and friends, Windows Live Spaces may be the easiest to use.

For those who want to get into more conventional blogging, I personally think that between WordPress.com and Blogger…you may need to get a coin to flip. They are that close. The main differences lie in whether you want to spend much time prettifying your blog, or whether you want a site which is stripped and functional (to allow your prose to shine through that much more clearly…

In any case, they are all easy to set up, and easy to run…so, it looks like it is now your turn to decide…