Which Blog Host?

There are so many hosts out there for blogging, that it can be daunting to choose where you want to call home.

This of course, largely depends on what exactly the blog will be used for. If you want to encourage an educational use of the blog, it wouldn’t exactly give you credibility to host your project at Xanga per say. However, it also isn’t a good idea to immediately dismiss hosts simply because they haven’t been used for such in the past. Who knows what tools and learning can be achieved through friend’s friends pages? And isn’t using blogs for educational tools right on that same line of thinking?

Take Live Journal for example…I have one and it has very friendly collaboration tools, more so than any other host I’ve found. If I’m interested to find other library journals, I simply do an interest search, and voila…many communities and individual journals come up. The friends page concept also helps me to keep track of my “friends” and the journals I’m interested in without having to learn and use a different tool/service. However, the personal nature of even the name, Live Journal, wouldn’t lend itself to serious educational connotation.

Then we have all these fun tools from Google, which make blogging as easy as you may want, with a million different ways to update, but only a few choices as how to display things, and not an easy way to find each other. If you do a blog search on Google, it only searches the content for your keywords, there isn’t a central interest bank to find each other with.

Edublogs and other such important sounding hosts have the ability to tag, like Live Journal, which is such a neat organizational tool, but their layouts and posting access is limited to clumsy looking links and complicated terminology designed to look impressive, but really just intimidates and confuses. Nothing like obfuscating to beat the competition, eh?

So…where do we host? What one service could possibly meet the needs of these new bloggers? How can we show a simple service that holds some dignity and respect behind it’s name (no My Space stigmata, please!) and yet is streamlined enough to have a very uncomplicated and unintimidating way to update and learn blogging, with enough tools to keep it exciting and fun?

Is there a perfect host out there?
And is Google going to be upset that I am asking without giving them top billing and perfect referral even though I’m posting on their service!