Blogger vs MSN Spaces vs Yahoo 360

WSJ.com compares the most popular free blog-creation services in terms of publishing text entries, or “posting” as it is called in blog land; adding photos; publishing links to other Web pages on our blogs; providing privacy online and also the overall style and formatting options provided on each site.

The verdict: Microsoft’s MSN Spaces did the best job of performing these tasks in a way that was organized and self-explanatory. Yahoo 360 was almost as easy, but it tries to tie in the use of too many other Yahoo services. Blogger.com has a long way to go until it becomes as easy to use as the others.

The author comes down heavily on Blogger.com due to the following reasons:

1. Editing photos: ..to add a photo to go with her post .. download a separate program called Hello from Picasa, a photo service that, like Blogger, is owned by Google.
2. Requires HTML knowledge: ..instead of offering a place for entering lists of URLs on your blog, you must instead follow directions to enter HTML code in the blog’s Template section.
3. No Privacy: all of Blogger’s blogs are public, without any way to set restrictions on who can or can’t see your blog.

I do agree that posting photographs in Blogger posts is a bit tedious but with a service like Flickr, you can just send an email to Flickr with an image attachment and that email automatically translates into a blog post with captions and a body.

Blogger is the only service that support Universal XML-RPC Weblog Interface that allows third party clients like w.bloggar to add/edit/delete posts.

Blogger gives you complete control over the look n’ feel. You can use the available blogger templates or write them from scratch. The only limit is your imagination. Imagine your Adsense CTR if the GoogleAds are not blended with the text. And this flexibility only comes with Blogger.

Privacy.. Do you really want it ? Add robots meta tag and search engines will dare not visit your site. Don’t ping and nobody will ever discover you.

But Blogger is painfully slow and even Alexa statistics support my statement.
Site Stats for blogger.com: Speed: Slow (61% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 2.3 Seconds