real estate on the blogosphere

As was evidenced by my very first post here, I have had a number of "blogs". I've apparently been a member of blogger.com since 2002 (which is sort of scary), xanga even longer...I've had an AIM account since 1998 and I definitely tried making a website in middle school. It happens. I like to blurt things out over the internets.

I am by no means an expert, but I'd like to outline my experiences on all of the different blogging sites and services I have ever used. You can't stop me! :-)

...just a template for those who don't need an audience...
Though there is a community aspect involved in some way, I put Blogger (which is clearly what I'm using now) and Wordpress in one category in my mind. They present you with an easy way of creating a blog, with no primary purpose of necessarily sharing towards a particular audience of people who are also members of the same service.
Blogger - easy to use multiple-author blogs and for what I find to be the right mix of customizability in both the posts and the look of the site while still being super easy to use. I like the hint of community that Blogger gives since everyone tends to have a username (especially since Google integration) so that you have a more of an online "personality" with your comments, and not just a single weblog. In addition, the automatic picture hosting on picasaweb is a great idea.
Wordpress - though you can get a hosted blog similar to blogger at wordpress, this is the blog service for people who at least on principle need something more standalone. At least a few years ago you could both host your blog on another site (as you can easily also do with Blogger) or get fancy or pretend to and use premade source code. A quick look at the site now doesn't show that feature anymore, and it seems to also have group blogging. But...Blogger wins this round with Google accounts I think. That said, I would rate Wordpress to have higher street cred for being legit. :-)

...we're a happy family...
Xanga, Livejournal, Vox and MySpace are put in the same category because it's almost most of the fun that you're part of a community, that your friends are also on it and people who subscribe to you will read what you say on a regular basis.
Vox - more of a community service than I give it credit for since I didn't know enough people on it I decided not to comment. (But the home page says to share with friends and family?) What I did notice is that it has a very clean look with bounties of pleasant, tasteful templates to choose from.
Xanga - personally I think it's in a downturn...it's rather unsufferably cluttered, and I've personally "grown out" of it. I log in once a month for the 3 people who use it who I'd like to hear from, and I see that possibly nice features have been added, but I can't be bothered to try it out. It was nice when I had a lot of friends on it though, and I had no gripes then.
Livejournal - affectionately called LJ, it's clean and no-frills enough to appeal to older users. I joined because I knew other people on it, and personally, though other people don't rave as much about it, I find the customizability in who can read your blog absolutely to die for. I guess maybe other people don't feel as much of a need to hide very specific things from very specific people...
At least placed head to head with Xanga, at the time that I joined LJ, Xanga only allowed for a few "protected" users (1 custom group) while LJ gave you the opportunity to make as many groups as you want to make sure that the post gets seen by the right people.
MySpace (not for music purposes) - I joined just to see one friend's pictures. And two people I actually knew have friended me since, which was cool, since I had no other way of contacting one of them. However, the number of random spam sketchy friend requests otherwise was too much for me. And I had no intention of becoming one of the stereotype who use MySpace. But when I took a look at my friend's MySpace page I realized it was actually a pretty cool set up. You had a blog (more so than the "notes" on Facebook), shared pictures, videos...a set up I really like. If only it weren't so sketchy.

...here is a thought for all to see...
Facebook (yes, I'm counting it for today...), Tumblr, and Twitter (also not a blog I KNOW but hear me out) are in the last category. For the most casual blogger, you have options too. When I say "here is a thought," I mean just a thought.
Tumblr - the only actual "blog" on this list, is gaining popularity. Hosting "tumblelogs" with primary purpose of just capturing a thought, tumblr allows as close to one click blogging as possible. You choose if you want to post a photo, quote, conversation, video, whatever, and then add a caption if you feel like and you're done. You post a picture of a clown and you type "I had a nightmare about clowns last night." Done. It's not that you can't do that with other blogs, but this one flat out encourages it. In fact, my new "style" is inspired by my reading tumblelogs and trying it out for myself. It wasn't for me because I tend to be long winded and also I didn't know many people on tumblr (you subscribe just like the services in the last category) and so it wasn't as fun. There's this nice "reblog" aspect which I liked a lot...where you surf around other tumblr accounts and decide, I want to reblog this picture, and you do, and you comment on it, sometimes making a conversation out of it, and credit is given to the original poster. Nice. There is mobile and IM options for posting.
Twitter - THAT said, mobile and IM posting? Why, tumblr sounds like twitter plus pictures and media! It's true...twitter is really just a text-only unformatted version of tumblr. (Or I think twitter came first, so tumblr is a media-enhanced version of twitter!) It does NOT have the intent of being a "blog" but essentially it is...you just twitt whatever you want wherever you are and in the end it's just a bramble of thoughts. I liked twitter in theory, but once again, you need friends that do it. Also something went wonky in its IM twittering system and I haven't been able to do it in ages (they're working on it) so I'm taking a break from it.
Facebook - THAT said, facebook statuses and notes are a bit in the same vein as twitter.

I'm done here. Ask me for actual opinions. I didn't want to make this like a review of the sites beyond impressions since...well...that would require me to write with a bit of snootiness which I was not in the mood for today.

Peace.