So, I have decided to get off my ass and actually start the blog that I've been talking about. I've been looking around at the various platforms (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, etc.) and they all seem pretty much the same. Does anyone have a specific recommendation or warning?

Do you have any specific wants? Also, are you integrating into your own URL or website?

I don't know the market well enough to advise, but those are probably differentiators.

Man, the Swype recognition algorithm is better than SlideIt. What features does SlideIt have over its competitors? And how come Apple didn't patent this entry method? I thought that's what they do?

Nah, it will mostly be text, with possibly a pic or two of something interesting thrown in. I'm not going to use my own website (not that I have one).

Vortex,

it seems a few here love Wordpress, but I really liked posterous when I was keeping a blog regularly this summer.

Can you use Wordpress without a site to use it on?

Dana, you can get a free hosted blog at wordpress.com, or use the wp software on your own site.

I didn't know they hosted. I guess they'd be stupid not to.

So I'm looking to see what differentiators there are in the Android keyboard market, since Swype seems so perfect for me. Why hasn't it taken over the world? Maybe ugly code, maybe reasons that no one can divine.

SwiftKey X, which I got for 10 cents the same time I got SlideIt, couldn't be less me. Is a social keyboard. It analyses your text on FB, twitter, gmail, etc, and uses that to fuel its engine:

Our tests show that before personalization, roughly one third of next words are correctly predicted without any characters being entered and around 80% are predicted within two or fewer letters entered. This accuracy is then boosted further due to SwiftKey X’s individual user personalization features.

It's magic! If you use FB or twitter (do you readily want it to learn from your length constrained entries? I guess, if you're going to do more) or native SMS. That's a lot of strikes. Maybe it uses other apps--I can't tell because the install won't complete on my tablet.

Creepy if applicable, but nifty.

Double post.

I'm in the process of switching over from Blogger to Wordpress.com now. They are both free, but each has pros and cons.

I think Blogger is easier to get started on and you can do a lot more tweaking to the look of your site (for free). You can use CSS on Wordpress, but you have to have a paid account, otherwise the basic themes are extremely inflexible. And WP doesn't always play nice with basic html in your posts. For example, it will strip out extra lines between paragraphs. That's why I say I'm in the process of transferring my blog. The importing of the posts worked okay, but I have to re-edit the html on each post for spacing etc. with some work-arounds I've found. If Blogger wasn't Google I would probably stay there.

That said, although the Wordpress dashboard was very intimidating at first, I'm getting used to it. But I think that's mostly because I'm more used to blogging now. When I first considered using it, it seemed far more complicated.

I also think I like the WP combination of categories and tags for labeling posts and the comment system, which allows for specific replies to comments as well as some threading. I've had people have problems leaving comments on Blogger. And when the new Explorer came out in late summer, I felt like Google was purposely not supporting it and staying logged in was a problem, even as host. It's the main reason I switched to Chrome.