Blogger and LiveJournal

I think both of these blogs offer good services to both the casual and “semi-pro” blogger. Both offer easy sign-up, clean, easy to use post tools as well as templates to personalize the look of your blog.

• An obvious difference is that Blogger only has one type of service while LiveJournal offers both basic (free) service as well as an enhanced (fee) type of service. Personally I find that the templates in Blogger are fewer, but more attractive, which of course is a subjective observation.
• On both Blogger and LiveJournal, I find that writing my posts in Word, then copying and pasting the entries into either blog yielded odd results. Blogger had trouble taking my Word 2003 document, at first indicating that there were html encoding errors. This happened while I was on my PC (XP). A later post from a Mac went smoothly. LiveJournal posted without errors, but note how the font looks different in LiveJournal near the end of the post—this despite selecting all and trying to assign a font and point (small) size. Blogger was also fickle with fonts.
• LiveJournal has much more advertising attached to it while Blogger has a much more clean look, focusing strictly on blog posts.
• Blogger is associated with Google thus signing into Google (gmail, etc.) means you’re able to go right into your Blogger account.
• LiveJournal uses reCAPTCHA, a technology that puts the public to work making corrections to OCR (optical character recognition) errors for various text documents scanned and run through OCR software. Basically, one of the words you saw when typing in the obfuscated word to eliminate automated computer sign up for accounts was a word from a text document that OCR couldn’t correctly assess. Last year alone, people exposed to reCAPTCHA have transcribed with 99 percent accuracy the equivalent of over 17,000 books. Cool! Here’s an interesting article about it from NPR.