Why I chose Blogger?

I've already had this question asked to me, and my blog only moved yesterday! Why did I move from the "Microsoft" Live Spaces to the "Google" Blogger / Blogspot?

Unfortunately it was depressingly simple. I got fed up with the lack of features on Live Spaces. My more popular posts were being flooded with spam comments, I had no way of changing the URL (even within the spaces namespace, let alone use my own custom one!) and I was quite limited in terms of available templates.

The main features I like with Blogger are therefore:

• Moderation of comments and support for blocking "bots" from posting comments
• Ability to control comments on a post by post basis!
• Ability to control URL
• Support for custom domain names
• Complete control over HTML template / colours / styles
• Multiple {Tags | Labels | Categories} per post (why does Live Spaces only allow 1??)
• Better post navigation (tag clouds and tree-view for post archive)
• Improved analytics (or .. more accurately Google Analytics, which I probably could have used on Live Spaces but the built-in statistics for Live Spaces are extremely poor). 
• Improved Text Editor for posting new posts (better paragraph / styling support, ability to post an older publishing date and AutoSave is awesome!)

In the end it seemed like a no brainer. I've been putting it off mainly because I didn't want to have to go around updating all my links (plus my Google and Bing rankings will probably takes ages to catch up again).

But now I've taken the plunge I'm much happier, just got to put some elbow grease into getting it ship-shape in terms of styling and links (not to mention plenty of new posts too!)