It is interesting to see over the years how Blog Software has developed. Back in the days where CMS was a new thing, nuke was a "cool idea", and the word "blog" wasn't even around, the idea of Internet published diaries existed courtesy of news software. Since then, personal news postings have evolved to a new level, where discussions take place in addition to the day to day ramblings. And Blogging software has evolved as well, diving neatly into two little camps: hosted, and provided. For the sake of discussion, we will define hosted as services such as LiveJournal, and OpenDiary, whereas provided software refers to things such as Blogger, MovableType, B2 (and evolution), and Greymatter. The biggest undisputed difference between the two methods is their community. The exposure a blog gets on livejournal is often times much much wider than a personal blog on the Internet would normally get. This is immediately apparent through the rapid spreading of memes and quizzes through a livejournal community. On provided software, you rarely see the posting of memes and snippets from quizzilla, but instead see more technology oriented discussion, most likely a result of a more tech-savvy audience. And so where is this all leading? Well, you can't do something like this for free on the Internet forever, and it was only a matter of time before Blog hosters and providers alike needed to find a way to keep their software and ideas aloft. How they have chosen to do it is perhaps what may eventually make or break the blogging community.
LiveJournal has been around forever, and probably will continue to be around forever more. They have opened their registration up, meaning there is no more invite codes, no more limits to the number of users, and no limit to the number of usernames that are going to be taken by the time you read this. In order to recoup the costs associated with servers, the LJ staff has opted to provide free accounts the option to pay money. With the payment of more money, users get all of 3 things. More pictures, more customization, and the ability to read RSS feeds. For those that have been missing the accelerating demand for RSS, these small files of content make it possible to read things with very little load time. This makes RSS ideal for syndication. The most important thing in LiveJournal though from the average user's perspective is the ability to customize. If you have a web site and you want to include your journal, the easiest (and most accurate) answer is "tough shit, pay up". There is no easy way to work with templates, the style system is impossible for most people to deal with, and in the end, nobody takes advantage of the features they just paid for. Expect LiveJournal to be around for some time, although their source of revenue will never be people who are serious about blogging, but more about people who want the post icons, the easy commenting, and a fast way to check up on all their friends.
OpenDiary was a mistake. I don't need to explain this too much, but there is a character limit on your posts, and the software was completely coded using ASP. Add in your benefits of shelling out more money than LiveJournal and getting even less (faster server, ad-free, 10,000 character limit) and you can expect OpenDiary to be packing its bags and going home within a year or two. When OD started to die, there was a massive insurgence of users (self included) to LiveJournal. The hardest part was letting go of the old community. Maybe the fact everyone has left will improve the reliability of their code.
Blogger remains to this day one of the defining web log tools. It sits somewhere between provider and hoster, creating software for publishing, but not actually hosting any of the blogs. Through the use of FTP and templates, Blogger offers users a chance to integrate their blog into their web page with minimal hassle. A user can keep the free version of blogger indefinitely, and only needs to move to the Pro version when they have the desire for the bells and whistles. For some, they won't even need the added features. Since Blogger is backed by Pyra, there is little actual need for a monetary income, giving them a lot of room to experiment with.
Greymatter isn't developed anymore, but it is free, so that should be at least a bit of credit to its name.
Movable Type by Six Apart is the far end of provided blog software. It takes a bit of patience (and having the readme file open when installing) to get it right. The only thing that Movable Type ever lacked was a community, something that they then fixed with their paid service, Typepad. It's Movable Type, it's fully configurable, it's got every bell and whistle you could want, and it now has a community of people blogging. In terms of learning curves, it remains slightly beyond blogger, perhaps the only thing making it less confusing is that it doesn't employ a third abstraction layer such as Smarty Templates.
So a year from now, where is all this going to leave the blogging world? A lot of it is going to hinge on what Movable Type and LiveJournal do. We can safely say OpenDiary is gone as an idea that failed miserably, and that Blogger will never go away. If LiveJournal capitalizes on what their real features are (the user pictures, audio blogs, etc) then it is more likely that they will succeed in the long run. They will probably not go away though, as they always have a large surplus of people who just like to post quizzes. Movable Type however, will be an interesting piece of software to watch. Currently, it is only used by the technologically adept, since it is difficult to set up, has some web server requirements that are not always standard, and has many features the average user doesn't understand. As things like Trackback and syndication become more important to the average user, so will full-featured tools like Movable Type. But some just want a pretty picture or 15.
Waiter, there's a Jakob in my Piroko. Or was it a Piroko in my Jakob?
In response to "Blog Software Developments":
What about Xanga?
(theres an active war of LJ vs. Xanga out there XD)