WHICH blogging software or service is best? This question from a reader caught me by surprise because I didn’t have a ready answer.

Although I have maintained a Web site since 2003 and converted it into a blog in 2006, I have not done much tweaking on the underlying code that drives my site.

Since the beginning, I’ve used the free version of Expression Engine, an excellent content management system that you can download and install on your Web server. But I didn’t do this after any deliberate or methodical selection process. As good as it turned out to be, I chose Expression Engine simply because a blogger friend had recommended it, and offered some invaluable assistance in setting it up.

Not everyone will be so fortunate, however.

The first choice you will have to make when starting a blog is whether you want to use a public blog site or if you want to buy a domain and pay a Web hosting company to host your blog on one of its servers. The second option gives you much more control but it’s also more difficult to get started, requires some knowledge of HTML and CSS and entails some start-up costs.

Among self-hosted Web publishing software, WordPress is acknowledged to be the most popular among bloggers.

Pingdom, a company that tracks uptime of Web sites, noted in January that WordPress accounted for 27 of the top 100 blogs as ranked by Technorati. Movable Type was used by 12, Drupal by four, and Expression Engine, by one.

For most users who simply want to get their feet wet, a free public blog site is probably the best way to go.

Blogger.com (www.blogger.com), owned by Google, has a number of advantages.

Living up to its tag of “push-button publishing,” Blogger is ridiculously easy to set up. It took me about a minute to create a sample blog and to start posting to it. Once I created my blog, it was also very easy to change the way it looks by choosing from 38 templates, or changing the colors and fonts used.

Another major plus for Blogger is that it makes it easy for you to display Google ads on your blog so that you can start earning from it. If you don’t have a Google AdSense account, you can even create one from within Blogger.

Addresses of blogs hosted by Blogger use this format: yourname.blogspot.com, although you can also tell Blogger to use a domain you own.

Setting up a blog at Wordpress.com (the free hosted service at http://wordpress.com) is a little more involved. Unlike Blogger, there is no step-by-step guide to creating your blog after you’ve signed up for it. You’ll have to make your way from the home page to your dashboard to create and manage your blog. Still, it isn’t all that difficult to do once you’ve figured out where everything is, and there’s a lot to like about this free service.

One of the features I like best of Wordpress.com is how easy it makes it for you to get professional-looking blogs. The 76 gorgeous templates which can be customized have a lot to do with this. Also, unlike Blogger.com, Wordpress.com doesn’t attach a panel bar at the top of your site with its logo on it. This minor detail enhances the professional quality of your site by hiding its free hosting and letting your visitors focus on the title of your blog without being distracted by another logo.

Curious about how many people are visiting your blog? Wordpress.com can cough out statistics about traffic, where it’s coming from, which posts are most popular, and which search engine terms are sending people your way.

Addresses of blogs hosted by Wordpress.com use this format: yourname.wordpress.com. To use your own domain, you can register it with WordPress ($14.95 a year) or map an existing domain name to your WordPress blog ($9.95 a year). To be able to edit the underlying code of your blog costs $14.95 a year.

Unfortunately, you can’t earn from your WordPress.com blog. In fact, WordPress may occasionally post its own Google ads on your blog to support its free service. To turn off the ads is a premium feature that costs $29.97 a year.

Blogger and WordPress.com aren’t the only free public blog sites. Other popular sites such as Vox (www.vox.com) and LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) put more emphasis on social networking.

Typepad (www.typepad.com), from the same company that makes Movable Type and Vox, is a popular paid blog hosting service that offers an easy way to create and maintain a professionally designed blog. The basic service, which costs $4.95 a month, offers a lot more customization and upload options than either Blogger or WordPress, and it doesn’t cost very much compared to what you would pay for a self-hosted blog.

Which service is best depends on what you want and what you’re willing to pay to get it. If all you want is a free blog, both Blogger and WordPress.com will do the job. WordPress.com will do it with a little more panache, but it will not let you earn from your blog. On the other hand, if you’re willing to pay $4.95 a month, Typepad seems to be an excellent choice, giving you ease of use and the flexibility to customize and earn from your blog.

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