There are many options for the budding blogger looking for a free platform to publish thoughts, news, images, videos and more on the internet. There are many things to look out for including advertising, up-time of blogging service, user interface as well as the community. Here is a list of our favorite blogging platforms, in no particular order:
Tumblr
If you frequent micro-blogs published by friends and family, you’ve no doubt heard of Tumblr. Tumblr is mainly used for short quotes, video and images ( those rare full-fledged articles are hard to find) and sharing features like ‘reblogging’ allows users to make a copy of your post on their own Tumblr. It’s a great option if you want a splash in the publishing world and don’t want to write long articles. Tumblr is one of the simplest blogging platforms I’ve seen and making posts are only a click of an icon away.
Posterous
The main idea behind Posterous is simplicity. By sending a email to post@posterous.com you can post something to your blog immediately making it useful for posting quick words and images, but who says long articles don’t belong on here? There are less features for the power user to customize but they’ve also got a group option which they describe as an email list on steroids.
Blogger
Owned by Google, users of this full-fledged blogging platform will get a (name).blogger.com. Features include the Blogger Template Designer which allows more control over your theme, the ability to post your own advertisements through Google AdSense and the use of pages. If you don’t like the dashboard, don’t worry it is set to change later this year as one of the major changes.
WordPress
WordPress is very popular for its open-source software which users host on their own servers and is 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites use it. However, WordPress also has a free hosting option where you get your own subdomain (for example, linearfix.wordpress.com). WordPress has a very active blogging community which can be found in forums and tags. WordPress is supported by advertising and bloggers can’t display their own advertisements. On the positive side, WordPress is very customizable and feature rich including polls, many themes, 3GB storage, sharing options and statistics galore.
