School still trying to figure out which blog is best to be deployed for use by staff, so I did a simple comparison between Google.com’s Blogger and the open-source pLog

	Blogger	pLog
Cost	Software and hosting are free	Only Software is free – must use our own webserver (can be the same one used by school website).
Interface	Colourful and very simple to use	Plain but also uncluttered and straightforward to use.
Speed	Must regenerate pages every time user publishes – will get VERY SLOW over time. Server is based overseas so loading can take a long time.	Dynamic publishing – posts appear without need to regenerate blog. Optimised for Speed. Can be installed on a local server (in own country) so loads very quickly compared to an overseas site.
Reliability	Experiences downtimes with heavy user traffic (especially as it is a free service used by many around the world). Could be down for a long time – must wait.	As reliable as our web host. In case of server problems, help is but a phone call away
Attachments	Uploads are possible	Uploads are possible. Option to organise files into “albums”.
Pictures	As with attachments.	As with attachments.
Search	No search function available.	Viewers can search entire blog for particular keywords.
WYSIWYG editor	Available	Available
Templates	Available	Available and can be pre-installed for all users.
Links manager	Not available	Available. Links can also be sorted by pre-defined categories.
Post categories	Not available.	Viewers can view posts organised by Categories e.g. Subject1, Subject2, etc
Archives	Available	Simple archiving available
Summary page	Not available. Must manually create a list of user blogs.	Only a single installation for as many users as needed. A “summary” page with listing of all user blogs automatically generated, with latest posts etc. Can act as a “blog portal” – a single URL for viewers to remember.

Looks like pLog has just about everything in its favour. The only thing I have reservations about though is the user interface. While (especially in the just-released version 1.0) the UI is clean looking, alas it still isn’t as user-friendly to a newbie blogger as Blogger’s is. This is really important for teachers, who already have so little time for social life 🙁 that they really can’t afford the time to have to figure out what certain checkboxes mean.

Where UI in an open-source blogging software is concerned, my top choice is still DotClear. Alas, it lacks the many features of pLog. I’ll just have to wait and see how it goes…