Best Blogging Platforms – Free Blogging Software and Features

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According to Wikipedia “A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” Blogs typically can be a Personal blog where an individual expresses his thoughts  or it can be Professional blog where professionals discuss about various subjects and makes earnings from the blog.There are plenty of platforms out there to setup your blog. These platforms can be either Hosted Services or Self-Hosted blogging platforms.
If you use hosted Services you don’t have any Web hosting. Example services include TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, and more.
If you have Web hosting available or are planning to purchase hosting space and planning for maintaining  your own blog installation, you’ll want to consider a self-hosted package. These include Movable Type, WordPress, and Textpattern.

There are free and paid blogging platforms. Let us discuss most popular among them.

WordPress
Wordpress is the natural choice of many. It has lots of features and supports.Thousands of plug-ins and themes are available to make your blog live and beautiful.The WordPress UI makes it really easy to navigate your way around.
There are two kinds of WordPress blogs , self-hosted – WordPress.org – and WordPress.com, which is hosted by WordPress.
Both are free but have different advantages.
If you want complete and total control over your blog and you have hosting space purchased with MySQL and PHP support, download WordPress from http://www.wordpress.org . This is completely free.You can set up WordPress in few easy steps.
http://wordpress.com is a free hosted blog platform.here you don’t have many features and control of your blog.You will get a sub domain based on your choice here. For example http://subdomain-name.wordpress.com

Blogger
Google’s own blogging platform and is really Google friendly.Adsense ready blog platform.Beginners will love Blogger’s ease of use and the fact that it’s free. But when you look for professional blogging platform Blogger is not the choice for many.
Recently blogger has come up with many new features. The project is know as Blogger In Draft . Read more about that here .Blogger In Draft introduces Blogger Template Designer and allows to add pages now
If you want to host your blog on blogger itself,then like wordpress.com you will get a sub-domain like http://livekerala.blogspot.com. Otherwise there are options like using a domain name of your choice and host on blogger itself or FTP hosting on your won hostng space.

TextPattern
Even though it has many features what wordpress has the support from the internet community is less. Also the way developers are coming up with themes and plug-ins for wordpress is missing here.This is also free blogging platform.
It has an easy publishing using textile and one good Text-to-HTML converter.You can preview post/page.It has built-in trackbacks , pings support and RSS and Atom plugins. Powerful Spam protection system an also provides site statistics

Movable Type
Free and esay to use.It is It is written in Perl language.You can use a variety of databases to store blog content, including MySQL, SQLite, Berkeley DB, or even PostgreSQL.Movable Type is not an open source project like the other packages like wordpress.

Vox
Vox has powerful privacy controls and hundreds of beautiful designs.This is more community-centric blogging, including Friends lists.Vox has a good built-in editor.The privacy setting allows you to decide who can view your posts etc. Using that privacy features you can choose the privacy level for every post, every picture, every sound clip, every video. You can also integrate with services like Flickr and YouTube.

Typepad
Typepad has 100′s of themes and you can customize your own.If you are ready to spend a small monthly charge, you can create professional-looking blogs with Six Apart TypePad.com. One-click integration with Twitter and Facebook, plus built-in search engine optimization.TypePad enables you to blog directly from your mobile phone.You can use blog traffic statistics to analyze marketing initiatives and has a built-in anti-Spam to block spam.You can add widgets and pages.There are plenty of other features available.

Joomla
Jomla is another popular blogging platform but is slightly more complicated blog creation software compared to wordpress and blogger. It offers much more flexibility, but is not as easy to get up and running as Blogger or WordPress.com.
You can download the Joomla package file, upload it to your web server, and configuring it.

Xanga
Xanga is also a community-centric blogging platform.Moderately easy to use.It has lots of potential.

Spaces
Easy to use platform.It has some good features and lots of flexibility.

LiveJournal
This is not very easy to use. But many people in the bloggig community are using this.

There are  other blogging platforms like LifeType ,Flatpress ,Wheatblog etc also available on internet.