Get a free blog: here's 5 of the best services

Back in the early days of the Internet, online diaries were confined to the web sites of those who hand crafted their web sites through line after line of code. Consequently, they were very technical and weren't really that interesting.

That all changed when blogging services started cropping up on the web, making it far easier to keep an online diary and not worry about how it all worked. In fact, it has become so popular that now there's hundreds of blog services, and all claim to be the best one out there. Fear not, though. Instead of picking the wrong one and being confined to blogging in the dark basement office of the Internet, follow our advice as we highlight the best ones for you.

Article continues

Live Spaces - spaces.live.com

Windows Live Spaces aims to rival the dominance of MySpace in the social online networking world. It offers a drag-and-drop interface that can add everything from your favourite web sites to a photo slideshow, and it looks great. It is a little overwhelming if you just want to create a basic diary, though. You can tie it to your sign-in name, and your updates are available to everybody in your contact list.

Blogger - www.blogger.com

Blogger offers users a dedicated service and an excellent host of options to make your blog look slick. You can choose from lots of backgrounds and styles, with a variety of colours. Pictures can be uploaded from your desktop, and you have full control over their position on the page. Compared to MySpace, people are less likely to find your blog by accident, so you will be relying more on people linking to you.

Facebook - www.facebook.com

Registering with Facebook can be a disturbing experience. Within seconds of logging into the site, it knows more about you than your mother does, and wants every piece of information you hold dear. Beneath the M15 overtones, though, it’s a nifty way to stay in touch with people: a neat combination of Friends Reunited and MySpace. However, the profusion of different options means that the site is confusing to use and the actual blogs take the form of short messages nobody can find. You can import an existing blog, but nobody will be able to find that either.

Wordpress - www.wordpress.com

This site works on a similar basis to Blogger.com, but offers more control over your blog. There are more appearances and designs to choose from, and videos can be embedded from YouTube or other sources. However, the site has little community feel, and the controls are very fiddly for inexperienced bloggers.

MySpace - www.myspace.com

MySpace has become so popular over the last few years that it’s almost shorthand for social networking web sites in general. The benefit of blogging through MySpace is its vast interconnected user network – your musings will be read by your friends, their friends, and weird Uncle Geoffrey. It suffers from a lack of options, though, and this means that your blogs can become bland and one-dimensional, because you have little control over their appearance.