When I recently decided to start a blog, I had to choose a blogging platform. For two reasons, I chose WordPress. First, I could start my blog in minutes through its free hosting service, paying only if I needed extras such as additional storage space. Second, I was attracted to WordPress's open-source software. If I ever wanted to have greater control over how my blog looked and functioned, it would be easy to set up a site at a domain name of my choosing and continue using the software. I'm not the only one attracted to this no-risk proposition. More than 3.5 million blogs--with hundreds of thousands of posts daily--are hosted on Wordpress.com, which is run by the Web startup Automattic.

Companies offering services like this have pretty much eliminated the need for a blogger to have technical skills. This has made it possible for many more people to maintain blogs, creating a rich online conversational environment (although, of course, one in which anyone looking for quality content has to sort out large numbers of uninteresting or abandoned blogs). In April, Google introduced a preview version of a tool, App Engine, that could do for the writers of Web applications what Automattic and its ilk have done for bloggers.