There’s any number of reasons to start a blog — bringing traffic to your site, keeping in touch with your friends and family, the simple desire to keep a journal without all those pesky blank books lying around the house. All of them are perfectly valid, but what you want to do with your blog will affect which service you use, what design template you choose, and how you present your blog to the world.

There’s LiveJournal, DeadJournal, and all its clones; Facebook, Orkut, Xanga and MySpace; Twitter, Blogger, TypePad, and a dozen others as well. They all offer different things to the discerning blogger, and most of them are constantly adding features and other improvements.

So, how do you decide?

For social networking, for instance, you’d want to go with a site like Facebook, LiveJournal, or one of its many clones. For someone who isn’t up to the challenge of long, introspective posts, or who wants to be able to keep a txt msg update of their daily lives, you might end up on Twitter. Someone wanting to present a more professional face, doing essays and articles, would probably use Blogger or TypePad. Kids might end up on Xanga. Anyone promoting a band would end up on MySpace, not to mention thousands of teenagers and twentysomethings just looking to hook up with friends.

Once you know what you want to use your blog for, it’s time to figure out what features you really need. For a lot of business bloggers, the main issues are ease of use, and ease of integration into their existing site design. But there are a lot of other features that make it a harder choice than it might seem — threaded comments, custom urls, posting clients and email or txt updates. In the end, only you can know what you need in a blog.

You never know, you may end up like many people out there in cyberspace, with more than one to suit your different purposes.