There are quite a few blogging platforms to choose from today. How do you as anovice blogger know which one is best? Here I’ll cover what I consider to be the “big three” - Blogger(Blogspot.com), Wordpress, and the moveabletype(typepad etc).

• Blogger -the easiest if you’re brand new. You don’t have to buy a domain, set up hosting, or know any funny PHP or CGl. Simply sign up and you’re blogging within 5 minutes. Sounds great! Then are some drawbacks to it though. You don’t have the level of control that you would have on your own domain, and there’s no built-in support for categories. Blogger could even shut your blog down without notice- and all your hard work would be lost.

• Wordpress - My current favorite, and probably the fastest growing platform. PHP based, Wordpress has no lengthy rebuilds -all your pages are generated on the fly. This does mean, however, that pages load a touch more slowly than a Movable Type page. The plugin system is simple, and the theme system is nothing short of brilliant

• Movable Type-the top choice to control multiple blogs from one spot. The free version allows unlimited blogs under one login, so you can sure save some headaches if you run several blogs. The bad part? Movable Type is rather difficult to set up. You need a domain, hosting.