They're really cheap, and hosting is very cheap as well these days. I've had Blogspot banned for many months now, because the splogging had gotten totally out of control, and now I'm getting tons of spam from Live Journal. I'll probably have to ban that as well.

It would be nice if some long winded, self-righteous commenters would get their own blogs.

yup. And with hosting, you often get out of the box setup for lots of additional software, apart from blogs.
Im running my site on HostRocket, unlimited bandwidth, and i can install basically any popular PHP/mysql stuff with couple of clicks through web interface ( Mambo/Joomla, Gallery, several choices of blog software, hey, even e-commerce and whatnot )

It's interesting, because I use bl0gspot for my blog, but since I actually have the domain name registered (with autoforwarding), I don't seem to have a problem.

~Jon

LiveJournal is about a half-step above the stereotype of AOL users, in my opinion. I'm surprised it's even still around, given the increase in popularity of FaceBook and My_Space.

LJ, like FB and MS, is for people to blog about their personal lives. I find it very odd that anyone would even think to use it for a serious web log.

If you have a moment, can you explain a little further about banning b******* and how you do it?

(This note edited because your software banned this post because of "questionable content")

Ahh, I see . . . the "questionable content" was the word B***S***.

Blogger is painful but not quite painful enough to make me want to move. And, yes, I know how easy it is to get a domain and setup a word press blog.

Soon, probably. All they have to do is keep thinking I'm a spam blog and keep me from posting from Performancing.

Ah - yes - Live Joural. I post there as well since some optimistic soul set up a LJ community I'm interested in and .. a lot of people I know also post there. Many SF fans for example post con notes and pictures there.

I have the same thing as Jon. I use blogger but I have it point to a registered domain name. I used BigDaddy.com if anybody cares.

I don't see any need to address moronic generalizations about the mission of LJ as a whole, so I won't. I have to note though, LJ is far cheaper than running your own server. I pay something like $25/year for it, and I get a few things which a cheap server won't provide (for example, a degree of slashdotting resistance). Of course, it's not anywhere near as versatile as a virtual system somewhere at Dreamhost, where you get to run your own MTA with your own one-time e-mails. The function of a dedicated webserver which I miss the most right now is anti-scribbing poisoning. Nonetheless, it's too much of a bother to roll my own.

One more feature keeping me on Livejournal:
Threaded comments.
If two guys start slanging each other over a tangent, you can still find all the on-topic comments easily. I'm boggled that wordpress, typepad, etc. haven't introduced that yet.

Which reminds me, since I'm being harassed in to non-existence in blogdom; Rand, you still have my blog listed. I'm deleting it post by post. Only about 4,000 to archive and delete at this point.

As Jon points out, you can still use Live Journal or Bl*gspot. Just create your own domain and have it forward to your blog. Spammers won't register domains just to spam because it costs money to do that (as of now) while creating the phony blog on Bl*gspot or Live Journal does not. So links that get spammed on Transterrestrial are going to come from these sites not from a unique domain.

Karl, I don't think that banning LJ would somehow prevent me from making an ass of myself in the comments of Rand's blog. So it's a non-issue really.

Fred Kiesche's awful experience with a psycho and dangerous harasser (no, not joking, I'm talking about a known-to-the-police armed psycho harasser) that has driven him to obscurity is both a shame and a tragedy.
I don't know whether to publicise it though, for fear of making the situation worse.
I do wish that the Psycho would set his sights on me though - because Canberra is a difficult place for anyone to get a firearm in, and he'd have to cross the moat that is the Pacific Ocean.

Plus he'd also have to visit Canberra. *ducks*

LiveJournal is about a half-step above the stereotype of AOL users, in my opinion...
I find it very odd that anyone would even think to use it for a serious web log.

I find it very odd that anyone invests software choices with such crisp status judgements, given that all the choices will be obsolete so quickly anyway.

Look up "commodity fetishization."

I find it very odd that anyone invests software choices with such crisp status judgements, given that all the choices will be obsolete so quickly anyway.

I think that it will be a very long time until having one's own domain becomes obsolete.

I think the LJ problem is the look (eg, you have cute pictures by the name of the person posting). It distracts from the content of the post and is the sort of thing you expect from entertainment oriented forums and blogs.

Just the dotcom. I'm not worried so much about the others, but if I were wealthier, I'd buy them all as well. But then I'd also have to get the hyphenated versions.