Hi Jason,
1. Blogger.com
It is the platform for creating and posting blogs from Google. To use Blogger, you do not need to have a domain, no hosting or installing programs, even knowing write any code. The blogs are hosted on Google servers within the domain blogspot.com
Create a blog in blogger is free and enough to have an account with Google.
WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get) is the place to create content for your first posts on it.
It allows you to use different templates and even customize using a template designer, and all without programming skills.
You can have your own domain instead of from blogspot.com
Blogger can be integrated with Adsense and Amazon to get an economic return. You can also integrate with Google Analytics for web statistics.
2. WordPress.com
This is similar to the option blogger. WordPress.com gives you the domain like yourdomain.wordpress.com and hosting your blog there. And It also provides a WYSIWYG environment ready to create content without HTML knowledge. You only need to register for free to start your blog.
It has variety of topics that further customize the blog to modify theme CSS.
It also has integrated web traffic statistics to analyze visits to your blog.
Using WordPress.com belong to a large community of bloggers.
WordPress is also responsible for security (backups), to tackle spam and offers a support to give you the help you need.
And if later you decide to have your own domain, you can do it without problem.
It is still not possible to place ads on the blog to monetize, but is something that seems to be available in the future.
3. WordPress.org
This is a free open source platform (open source) and it is installed on your own hosting and your domain. This means you need to buy a domain and hosting before you can install.
Try to check out
shared hosting offers area on this forum, I found one for me and you should find a good hosting before starting your own blog.
Hope it helps!
