Blogger's staffers share their likes and dislikes in Blogger Buzz.

Rosie O'Donnell recently started an internet Internet journal. She's not the first celebrity to keep a personal weblog; — musician Moby, actor/director Zach Braff and drag queen RuPaul have been bloggers for some time. However, when someone of Rosie O'Donnell's stature starts a blog, attention must be paid — if only to wonder why a middle-aged woman would use the incomplete sentences and lower-case proper nouns of a 15-year-old girl:

listening to joni
painting twisting wire
into roly women
waiting
2 blog again

Um, yikes. However, I'm not here today to slam Rosie (hey, I liked "A League of Their Own"), but to praise blogs. Like text-friendly cellular phones, expensive shoes and the Cooper Mini, blogs are a lifestyle accessory that says a little something about the kind of person you are. The average blogger is often personable, intelligent and revealing (usually too revealing; see RuPaul's entries about his colonic irrigation. Double yikes). And like everything else in this life, if you want a blog that perfectly fits the unique, not-necessarily-Rosie-shaped hole in your life, it's gonna cost ya.

Many blog sites offer a basic free service. Blogger, a Google-owned site, charges nothing for a basic meat-and-potatoes blog, and its aesthetics and functionality are ... um, OK. Don't get me wrong. A Blogger journal does what you want a blog to do, with little fuss. You can post entries from any computer with an Internet connection, make on-the-fly entries from a mobile device, and customize the look of your blog to a small degree.

To my mind, Blogger has two major drawbacks. It's the single most popular blog-hosting service on the Web,and to paraphrase that Groove Armada tune, if every blog looked the same, we'd get tired of looking at them. And recently, Google began offering Blogger subscribers the option of including a strip of targeted ads on their blogs. In other words, if your blog is about doll collecting, Google will serve it with Barbie ads. The unspoken message is that, while Google doesn't pressure you into taking the ad strip, the company has no problem with using you as an unpaid and unwitting advertising flack.

Having said all that, I must reiterate that Blogger is free and it does the job. It's the Yugo of the blogging world — it's what you drive until you can afford a car with hubcaps. But if you want a blog that's free of corporate meddling, LiveJournal is the way to go.

Comic artist Evan Dorkin has created his own unique look for his LiveJournal.

LiveJournal — simply "LJ" to its subscribers, which number in the millions — was started right here in Seattle by Brad Fitzpatrick, a student who wanted to stay in touch with his far-flung friends. He wrote a journaling program that included one feature I've not seen anywhere else: You can control who reads your blog entries. You can share your innermost thoughts with two million people, or just two. This basic feature allowed communities and sub-cultures to form within LJ and made blogging into something that could be much more intimate and personal.

Even before it was purchased by San Francisco-based online publishing concern Six Apart, LJ's free service was one of the best available. Inexperienced users are provided a large number of blog templates, all of which can be easily tweaked to your liking, while advanced users can peek at LJ's source code and make their blogs look any damn way they'd like them to look.

Upgrading to LJ's paid service — only $25 a year — gives you more toys to play with: many more templates, photo hosting and an RSS reader which can be used to subscribe to syndicated feeds from other Web sites. Want to read the latest news headlines in addition to the latest from your LJ "friends" group? The paid service can do that.

The downside is that, from the outside, LJ's tightly-knit community looks daunting. That's a nice way of saying "it looks like a freaky cult." People use LJ to share interests, solicit advice, do business with each other and even conduct love affairs. If you want no part of that soup, but still want a journal with lots of functionality and a sleek look, many seem to favor TypePad created and maintained by the aforementioned Six Apart.

TypePad seems to suit actor Zach Braff just fine.

TypePad isn't cheap — the basic service is $4.95 per month, $49.50 annually — but it provides such a high standard of service that many subscribers, including Rosie O'Donnell, gladly pay for Six Apart's services. You can easily create photo albums, customize the look of your blog and generate "Typelists" — lists of friends with blogs, recent reading and the like.

While LiveJournal offers many of the same features for less money, TypePad doesn't have LJ's reputation as "a journaling service with a lot of teen girls screaming OMG," as Six Apart President Mena Trott wryly tags it. In other words, the biggest difference between TypePad and LJ is largely in the heads of the people who use both services. If you can stand to be part of a community that's mostly young and given to Rosie-like bursts of lower-case piquancy, LJ is for you; if not, TypePad offers an address in a more distinguished neighborhood, but the price is substantially higher.

Of course, I haven't addressed the most basic question: Why in the hell would you even want a personal weblog? No one can answer that but you, but I will say this: I can't recall any other Web service that's offered so much for so little. Imagine someone handing out free cars, then allowing you to upgrade the chassis and engine to your tastes. Wouldn't you want to trick yours out a bit, meet Rosie at an intersection and challenge her to a drag race?