Six Apart, the company behind major commercial blogging platforms TypePad and Movable Type, has launched the Journalist Bailout Program, offering to provide free blogs to out-of-work media types. If you thought blogs were already free, you’re mostly right — sites like Blogger.com, LiveJournal and WordPress have long offered instant, cookie-cutter blogs to anyone with a … well, to anyone.

But the “Pro”-level membership Six Apart is giving out usually costs $150 a year, and comes with enough features and customer support to allay most technical worries — allowing the unemployed to concentrate on their real problems.

TypePad will cut you in on its ad program too. And though the program claims to feed its bloggers most of the revenue from any ads on their blogs, no one should expect to hear cash-register noises.

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In the past, when blogging was just emerging, blogs were mainly for personal usage. People who were blogging, were writing about their personal lives, their hobbies and their likes and dislikes only. It was correct to call blogs or web-logs “the virtual online diaries” at that time. However, these days, this notion has changed significantly. People who are marketing via internet are also taking help of blogs to market their products and promote their sales. These online marketers have changed the definition of blogs significantly. Blogs are no longer just the “personal online diaries”. Many entrepreneurs are using them for the purposes of business. Blogging is providing an easy platform for making money online.

How all these things take place, is quite simple. You choose a blog from a blogging platform and customize it with your favorite theme and color combinations, and start posting about your marketing experience or even about your products. There are many popular blogging platforms in use these days. Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, MoveableType etc are all easy to use and install on your web hosts. In fact, many web-hosting companies provide the popular blogging platforms with free installations.

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Over on his Tecosytems blog, Redmonk principal analyst Stephen O’Grady picks up a conversation that he and I first batted back and forth on Twitter. Twitter, with its 140-character limit to each post, can cramp even the simplest of dialogs. Take a complex topic like offline persistence of anything (a single page, data, applications, etc.) in a browser and I’m glad he took it to the blogosphere. Sometimes only a blog will do.

Stephen offered more details on what he wants, but so far can’t have. Something real simple (I hope I get it right now): Regardless of the current state of connectivity, the ability to bring back the most recent set of a browser’s tabs complete with any user data that might have been entered into those tabs. Not necessarily the whole app. Just that one page.

Having lost entire blog entries because my browser crashed while I was completing a TypePad or WordPress form (thankfully, the newer versions of WordPress auto-save much the same way Gmail auto-saves), I can completely relate. When I bring the browser back to life, I could care less about a functioning offline version of WordPress’ authoring tools. I just want all that hard work back.

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These days there are two basic types of blogging packages: those that host your blog on their servers, and those that require you to host it on your own server. Services that will host your blog tend to be more user-friendly but are generally less flexible. Today’s three main hosted blogging services are Blogger, Typepad, and Wordpress. Blogger and Wordpress are both free solutions and offer an array of features, including robust text editors, syndication, and an area for reader comments. They also are easy to learn and allow you to get started within minutes. While not free, Typepad offers great tech support, and monthly and yearly subscriptions range in price depending on the features you select.

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Ever since the iPhone first appeared, its potential as a mobile blogging tool was readily apparent. Bloggers on the go would be able to tap out short, informative posts from wherever they happened to be, maybe even using the phone’s built-in camera to post mobile pictures as well.

Of course, there was just one roadblock to this paradise of phone-based blogging: the iPhone unveiled in 2007 didn’t come with any software to support such a thing. That had to wait until Apple released its iPhone SDK and flung open the doors of its App Store to third parties. But now that those two things happened over the summer, bloggers-on-the-go have several choices for making sure that a weblog update is never more than a few taps away.

But which of those choices is the best option for the iPhone-toting blogging set? To find out, I downloaded three of the App Store’s more popular options—TypePad, WordPress, and iBlogger—and put each one through their paces.

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