According to MarketWatch Google's Blogger (the service I use for my primary blog) is hosting an estimated 8 million blogs, more than any of almost three dozen competing services. In second place is LiveJournal, with about 6.6 million accounts, according to research from Perseus Development Corp., a Web-based survey firm. Jeffrey Henning, chief operating officer of Perseus, said that 31.6 million Web logs have been created on hosting services, and he expects that number to grow to 53.4 million by the end of the year. The survey was based on a review of 10,000 blogs. Henning added that Microsoft has had a huge impact since its launch of a hosting service last December. "The primary challenger is MSN Spaces," he said. I suspect that Yahoo's Yahoo 360 will be a major player as well, when it comes out of beta test.

According to this Microsoft's MSN Spaces hosts more than 4.5 million blogs (spaces), and MSN is boosting storage for free MSN Spaces so customers will have three times the space to share photos - approximately 750 of them, and the latest version of MSN Spaces introduces more than 50 new backgrounds so people can personalize their MSN Space.

To the more artistic

You can control the arangment of various items on your MSN Spaces blog, and include or not include various sections.\

This is the main control screen for MSN Spaces

When you post an entry on MSN Spaces you can select the category of the item, and if none of the categories you previously selected is appropriate, you can create a new one.

This is what the MSN Spaces entry screen looks like

With MSN Spaces it is easy to upload files. You get a File Upload box

And you can select multiple files for each entry

Here is the first MSN Spaces entry I made. Note I uploaded three graphics. They were automatically converted to thumbnails for the entry, but you can click on any of them to see them full size

This is the item on Stamp Price Increase as posted on MSN Spaces

My test MSN Spaces blog is here.

The entry about the increase in price of stamps (used as the example in the article on Blogger is here

You can do a lot with a free LiveJournal, including archive of posts, an RSS feed for posts, an aggregator where you can get one RSS feed with your posts and posts on your friend's Live Journals, a blogroll with up to 5 entries, and up to 3 photos (File size must be less than 40k, Image dimensions must be no larger than 100x100 pixels, File format must be either PNG, GIF or JPG), and there is no requirement for a banner ad. They also have a paid service which will increase the blogroll to 30 entries, allow up to 15 pictures (with more at an additional cost, and it has other services like email gateway, post by cell phone, text messaging. The 5 and 30 picture limits may be expanded in the near future; they are betatesting a Scrapbook feature.

Blogging on Live Journal you set the date and time for your blog entry, enter a subject, and begin entering the text for the entry

And when you finish there are a number of options.

Note one of the options at the bottom of the entry screen is Rich Text mode. If you select that before entry, the entry screen provides the formatting tools like in many WYSIWYG programs

And the bottom of the screen is similar to the other screen

Note when you save an entry you have control over the comments that will be allowed

And you can screen comments (they will not be posted until you approve them, unless they come from the group you allow

You can also show what mood you were in when you posted the entry

Here is what the Stamp Increase article looked like when posted on Live Journal

My test LiveJournal is here

The entry about the increase in price of stamps (used as the example in the article on Blogger is here

• You can upload files with the extension jpg, jpeg, gif, png as long as they are no larger than 300 KB.
• Has the ability to automatically apply trackbacks, and it works

My test Blogsome blog is http://donsingleton.blogsome.com/

Like Blogger, they have a BlogThis Javascript to post to your Blogsome blog. File Space Available (31,457,280bytes)

In trying to change the options on Blogshome, I kept getting the error message "Sorry, you need to enable sending referrers for this feature to work." They have instructions for both IE6 and Firefox that supposedly showed how to fix the problems, but I tried them and they did not work. They also had instructions for my Firewall Zone Alarm Pro, and initially that did not fix it either until I discovered that in addition to allowing third party cookies from static.wordpress.org I also had to allow them from donsingleton.blogsome.com

One problem I never resolved was that the html code align=right does not work

Creating a blog is simple:

As you see I checked the box on Activate my Simple URL so my URL (http://360.yahoo.com/donsingleton) should be visible to everyone.

I was also asked who I wanted to see my blog, and who should be able to post comments, and I authorized both, and said to create an RSS feed.

This is to control page which allows me to create blog entries, edit my blog settings, edit my blogroll, etc.

I clicked Compose New Entry

This gave me an entry screen for a new blog item

Note there are a number of editing tools available:

You can also click View HTML source and enter your article with HTML tags.

When I did that I entered HTML like this:

And it was converted into code like this:

You can specify who can see your blog, and who can comment on it,

and you can specify who can send you a message about it, and who can send you invitations to view their blogs.

You can specify who can send you an Instant Message (IM) on Yahoo Messenger

and you can limit it to just friends, or include friends of friends, or include friends of friends of friends, or you can include everyone.

Yahoo 360 is still in beta, but as you can see I have 100 invites, so if you would like to try Yahoo 360, just ask me.

Here is what the Stamp Increase article looked like when posted on Yahoo 360. Notice that they do not support the align=right command on the img src statement.

My test Yahoo 360 blog is http://360.yahoo.com/donsingleton

Note, be sure you don't have a slash at the end of the URL, i.e. http://360.yahoo.com/donsingleton works but http://360.yahoo.com/donsingleton/ does not work. See this link.

The entry about the increase in price of stamps (used as the example in the article on Blogger is here

There are widely used software packages like Moveable Type (Free for 1 author and 3 weblogs, $69.95 for up to five authors, and unlimited weblogs, or $99.95 for unlimited authors and unlimited weblogs) and WordPress (free for the software, and it is available already installed at a number of commercial web hosts), and there are packages like Radio which offers a free 30-day trial period, and then costs only $39.95 per year complete with site hosting and 40 megabytes of storage.

There are also speciality blog hosts like http://www.photoblogs.org/, and Internet Video Magazine has a list of Free and Affordable Places to Host and Post Your Videos.

• an RSS feed for the blog in a Web Page (using a RSS Digest service provided by bigbold.com
• the actual blog imbedded in a Web Page using IFRAMEs

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