Blogger vs. LiveJournal

My fellow classmates, JH & JF:

Forgive me for taking until nearly the final hour to get this final post posted this week! I honestly had a bit of difficulty determining many differences between Blogger and LiveJournal (apart from the obvious, annoying & obnoxious overuse of ads in LJ!) Whenever I made note of some feature I thought was unique to one platform, I’d dig around a bit in the other to, lo and behold, find that it offered a similar feature as well.

Here’s a summary of the differences I was finally able to ascertain:

Blogger:
~Very easy to set up and use
~Clean interface
~Can also be posted to via txt messaging and email
~Comment notifications can be sent via email
~Can customize with HTML editor
~Ability to set up a “team blog” with multiple authors
~Automatic save feature


LiveJournal:
~Main emphasis seems to be on “creating communities”; lots of encouragement to find journals of those who have similar interests as yours
~Easy to set up and use (yet not, IMHO, as simple & straightforward as Blogger)
~3 levels of account types: Basic, Plus & Paid: http://www.livejournal.com/site/accounts.bml
~Plus account pages are littered with many distracting ads
~Can also be posted to via txt messaging, email AND voice (5/month on plus plan; 20/month on paid)
~Comment notifications can be sent via email, text message and IM
~Can customize layouts with CSS
~Lots of (also imho “gimmicky”) features: users can pick different “userpics” to display on each post, users can set their mood for (and get a LiveJournal-generated emoticon attached to) each post, posts can be marked as “memories” as well as others (such as, in the paid version, setting “background music” to one’s journal)