The Top Ten Blogging Platforms

 

Many people start blogs for all kinds of reasons these days – far too many to mention – but there is still a degree of confusion, especially for newbies, about which platform to choose. Experienced bloggers will likely opt for their platform of choice, more or less always wordpress these days, but there are stil many options to choose from. So what is the best blogging platform of all?? Wel…

Here’s my top ten list, hopefully including some surprises for you:

 

1 – WordPress:

For many people, including a lot of internet business people and marketers, wordpress is thge only choice for them. It is always up to date, has huge numbers of plugins and additions, and is very simple to use:

 

 

2 – Blogger:

Formerly known as Blogspot, this was acquired by Google and has now become a powerhouse blogging platform./ You just need a gmail account, or set up a new one:

 

 

3 – Typepad:

This is a fantastic platform, but sadly is only available as a paid for product. This is good in a sense as it avoids the abundance of spam that you can get with other platforms that are available for free.

 

4 – Movable Type:

Unusual and still developing blog platform, but with some high profile users such as the Huffington Post and Boing Boing. In some senses it is similar to wordpress:

 

5 – Live Journal:  A bloggin platform that allows users to connect with other live journal users.

A downside is that you need to display ads unless you upgrade to a paid account.

 

6 – Drupal:

More of an open source contant management system that a specific blogginf platform, this is nonetheless used mainly for blogging:

 

7 – Xanga

Less well known than the above, Xanga has emerged out of site for sharing reviews of movies and books etc. Now it has taken on a life of it’s own as a proper blogging platform:

 

8 – Textpattern - another CMS that has developed into a blogging platform. It has a decent community of open source developers who create addons and plugins:

 

9 – Tripod:

Some might remember Tripod sites from the early internet days when you’d be looking at angelfire sites and searching using lycos and altavista. It’s stil going, and has updated itself significantly.

 

10 – Squarespace:

Up and coming platform that is free hosted, but again requires payment to use. It offers some novel features however and is gaining popularity.

 

There’s certainly some surprises in here..maybe a few manes that are unfamiliar, but I think that as well as using the big established names, theres may be real benefits to trying out lesser known ones too – you never know, one of these “little guys” may be considered the top blog platform of all in a few years!