Getting Started - for Free

The best way to learn about blogging is to ... start a blog. I recommend starting with one of these two free popular blogging services:

• Blogger: Create your Blog Now -- FREE. Hosted by Google, Blogger.com is much improved in the last few months, since the Google purchase. You'll need to set up a free Google account, which gives you access to a whole bunch of other tools you'll want to use, anyway.
• WordPress.com » Get a Free Blog Here. Free hosting for blogs running the open source WordPress Blog Tool and Weblog Platform. Just set up a new account and you are off and running.

For a period last year, before Google bought them out, Blogger.com was in a slow death spiral: server performance was so slow and unreliable as to make it almost unusable. Out of frustration, I turned to WordPress and started The StratoPress on WordPress.com. I think WordPress is great, and I'm a big fan of open source software. WordPress was way ahead of Blogger.com when I launched The StratoPress, especially in terms of features and reliability. After Google picked up Blogger.com, they upgraded to a Google-style server farm, and the performance problems disappeared. In addition, overall reliability has improved steadily, if not dramatically. Finally, the Google elves have been hard at work adding new features and closing the gap with WordPress. At this time, although I think that WordPress still has a slight edge on features and interface I'd give the nod to Blogger.com because:

1. You'll want to set up a Google account anyway to use Google's Webmaster Tools and other great Google properties (like Gmail, perhaps).
2. Blogger.com makes it incredibly easy to set up AdSense ads on your blog, a simple first step to start making some scratch from your blog.
3. I suspect that Google may give their blogs on Blogger slightly preferential treatment when indexing -- but I can't prove this.

But, you can't go wrong with either choice. The important thing is to start blogging.