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So you want to be a blogger and it’s time to choose a blog host. But who? You could go with what all your friends are going with, but what if you’re the first one to start a blog? Or what if you’re not sure you want what they have?

You’ll want to do your own research, but in this section of this series, I am going to explore the basics of the big three – Blogger, Wordpress, and LiveJournal – to help you make your decision.

LiveJournal is the most recent experiment of mine. I moved from Wordpress to LiveJournal purely out of a networking nature. That’s not to say there aren’t other aspects to the host.

Like Blogger and Wordpress, LiveJournal is easy to sign up for and get going. While there was some fuss a while back about LiveJournal pulling the option to have free blogs, users don’t have to worry about that now.

LiveJournal is the choice that you will want to go with if making friends and joining communities sounds exactly like what you want to do. Moving above and beyond the typical blog host, LiveJournal grants you the ability to compile a friend list (and you will get a ‘friends page’ which is like a feed reader for your LJ friends’ blog entries), create and join communities, and peruse other people’s friend lists and communities.

If you want choice for templates, then you might be shoved into the realm of overwhelmed by how much choice you’ll have with LJ. Paid accounts have more options, but the template options for the free accounts certainly aren’t anything to snub. The thing that may not work so well for some bloggers (and works in Blogger.com’s favour) is that you don’t have the ability to easy copy and past templates not on offer. Paying gives you more options, but again, I’m sticking with what’s available at the free level.

The big negative for LJ, I believe, is that all of these options, choices, and things you can do with your blog can get a bit confusing. If a simple blog to place your occasional thoughts is what you want, LJ might not be the best choice for you right now. Why go for all the bells and whistles if you don’t need them.

However, if you are open to easy click friend making, communities, and much more, then definitely check it out.