Blogging today has become one of the best ways to get your ideas out there. People can blog about anything under the sun and others interested in the same, will read it. Almost everyone has heard of blogging by now and for those who haven’t; it’s a web log where you pen down your thoughts. Sort of like an online diary, but publicly accessible.

WordPress is the hot favourite as a platform which will host your blog or let you host your own. It has a wide variety of themes and plug-ins that let you customise your blog. What’s great is that you can do all this for free although a paid plan affords you more facilities. Basic set up is quite easy, but customization may not be everyone’s cup of tea. However, thousands of plugins make management much easier than other platforms. With 3GB of free storage and community support through forums, it is an enticing option for first time bloggers. Old hands have the opportunity to manage a whole bunch of blogs with multiple users.

Blogger from Google is another easy to use platform. Setting up a blog here takes note more than 20 mins if you understand English. Granted, it may not offer very exciting services as others but for a first time user, it’s easy and fun. Editing, updating, geo tagging your blog posts is all possible and a cakewalk once you get a hang of it, which is pretty soon. Next up, we have Tumblr, and with that we enter the microblogging terrain. Shorter than a usual blog but longer than a twitter feed, microblogging on Tumblr lets you put short frequent posts with text, pics and videos. It’s easy to operate and very informal.

Apart from these well known platforms, there are others like Drupal, Joomla, Posterous, SquareSpace etc where you can create a blog. All of these work on the same principle of giving your thoughts a big audience, with a few features different here and there. The level of customization possible may also differ from platform to platform, with services like Drupal and Joomla offering advanced modification capabilities.