Blogging Today. The Choices You Don't Know About.

Although social conversation, utilizing networks like Twitter, StumbleUpon and Facebook, have affected how we publish content online, blogging, and the integration of blog technologies, remains an important cornerstone of the web. Social networks help build audience and extend the reach of content, but established blogs link to or aggregate smaller sites, sending viewers to read more and produce original content.

Of course there are the well known blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr. WordPress is the leader in blogging. The platform powers almost 19 percent of the Web and has been downloaded more almost 50 million times. There's Blogger, an easy-to-use, free platform that requires only a Google account to get started. And there's the "hip" choice, Tumblr, the first mainstream service to combine blogging and social media. Tumblr has a strong community of users and content can be easily re-blogged making it easy to curate rather than relying solely on producing original content. There's also Medium started by Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone. It has a feature letting users edit and annotate other people’s work.

But there's other blogging platforms out there that are bringing fresh ideas and opportunities. Here's a few to consider if you're looking to launch a new blog.

• JUX is a great blogging platform for portfolios, business, and events. Slideshows can share images and display content beautifully.
• Jekyll. GitHub pages are powered by Jekyll, so a Jekyll blog site using GitHub can easily be deployed.
• Squarespace is a blogging platform popular with business users. Developing and hosting a blog is core, but the platform can also be used to create and manage a range of websites, such as an e-commerce site.
• BookLikes is a blog platform designed for book lovers. It helps people share their reading likes and discover new books through personal review.
• Postach.io. This blogging service works with Evernote, allowing users to write posts using a dedicated notebook. Postach.io hooks into the comment engine Disqus, supports Google Analytics, allows for custom domains, and social sharing.
• SETT is a community-focused blogging platform that promises engagement. It claims it can help writers get 98 percent more comments and more attention based on its community of users.
• Ghost is an open-sourced blogging platform born from Kickstarter. The platform has garnered praise for its elegance and promises  “the full Ghost software with all bells, whistles, themes, plugins, and some extras that are only available with us,”.
• TypePad has a small monthly fee and includes design templates, unlimited storage and customer service. Typepad emphasizes reliability, and is an ‘out-of-the-box’ service.
• Blog.com, with more than 2 million bloggers, has a lots of features like stats, domain redirection, personal favicons, lots of themes, lots of widgets, multi-author blogs, post from mobile and more.
• Posthaven arose from the shutdown of Posterous, The service is a ‘light-blogging’ experience, allowing posts and multimedia to be easily and quickly published. Blog pages can be open or permission based so it can be public or only for friends.
• Textpattern is an open source content management system that allows you to easily create, edit and publish content and make it beautiful in a professional, standards-compliant manner.
• Squidoo is a free platform that makes it easy to publish your interests and earn a royalty. It's a knowledge based blogging platform.
• Hubpages is a write and earn blogging platform for authors to share advice, reviews and tips with hundreds of other authors.
• Weebly is an easy to use and affordable platform for blog creation including a WYSIWYG page builder, media integration, domain management in an easy to use interface.