1. Self hosted
1.1. Pros
1.1.1. Tons of flexibility
1.1.1.1. Code highlighting
1.1.1.2. My choice of editors
1.1.1.3. My choice of commenting engines
1.1.2. Many more themes than available on hosted services
1.1.2.1. Potentially documented theme engines
1.1.2.1.1. Unfortunately, I've never bothered to make a custom blog theme and likely won't for the foreseeable future
1.1.3. Control over my own data
1.1.3.1. This is only sort-of true; importing and exporting between platforms can be a bear even if you have the tables
1.1.4. Almost definitely gives an incentive to participate in an OpenSource project
1.1.4.1. Unfortunately, this did not work when I tried to use drupal; instead I just fought with it and had occasional problems that I couldn't explain
1.2. Cons
1.2.1. Requires setup
1.2.2. Requires updates
1.2.2.1. Failure to update becomes a security risk
1.2.3. Linked to whatever hosting I pick for other projects
1.2.4. Favorite option would require more than a little work to get up to par of most hosted solutions
1.3. Blogging software
1.3.1. Zine
1.3.2. WordPress
1.3.3. Drupal
1.3.4. Build my own
2. Hosted Service
2.1. Pros
2.1.1. No trouble to administer
2.1.1.1. Less likely to randomly disappear because I wasn't paying attention
2.1.2. Likely more secure (someone else is looking after updates)
2.1.3. Not tied to hosting, so migrating hosting for other needs is simpler
2.1.4. Easier to focus on writing instead of fooling with blog software
2.1.5. potentially an automatic community
2.1.5.1. I think vox provides this
2.2. Cons
2.2.1. Potentially looks bad for a web developer to not host his own
2.2.2. Reduces incentives to contribute to an open source project
2.2.3. Removing ads costs money that could be put toward better hosting
2.2.4. Migrating text away is easy; migrating images and other files away is not so easy
2.2.5. At the mercy of a vendor
2.2.6. Locked into features the vendor has decided to provide
2.3. Blogging Services
2.3.1. Wordpress
2.3.2. Typepad
2.3.2.1. Crufty feeling WYSIWYG Editor
2.3.2.2. Has image hosting but not an interesting media browser
2.3.2.3. Ugly admin interface
2.3.2.3.1. Honestly, this isn't even fair. I think I just don't like typepad
2.3.2.4. Works with Zemanta
2.3.3. Blogger
2.3.3.1. Always ad supported
2.3.4. SquareSpace
2.3.4.1. Nice theme editor
2.3.4.2. Nice WYSIWYG for content
2.3.4.3. No meaningful interaction with outside media
2.3.5. Posterous
2.3.6. vox
3. What I'm looking for
3.1. Must have
3.1.1. Security
3.1.2. Data portability
3.1.2.1. Post import and export
3.1.3. Ability to use fully custom CSS and header images
3.1.4. Spam control for comments
3.1.5. Easy embedding or arbitrary HTML (like mindmaps)
3.1.6. Feeds filterable by tag
3.1.7. No ads
3.2. Nice to have
3.2.1. Media handling
3.2.1.1. Blog should have more images
3.2.1.2. Browsing for media should be very easy
3.2.1.3. Embedding shouldn't require a ton of thought on my part
3.2.1.4. Ideally would work with services I already use
3.2.2. Nice looking out-of-the-box themes
3.2.2.1. A theme with a complicated footer
3.2.3. Simple interface
3.2.3.1. WYSIWYG
3.2.3.2. Easy flash embeds
3.2.3.2.1. Ideally, I don't have to deal much with the embed codes themselves
3.2.4. Valid markup
3.2.4.1. I'm not sure how much I care about this in general
3.2.5. Auto-submission to mixx, digg, reddit
3.3. Likely unreasonably to want
3.3.1. Easy map and photo gallery embedding that works with flickr
3.3.1.1. I'd like to blog about events from time to time
3.3.2. Integrated amazon store and bibliography manager
3.3.2.1. I'd like to blog about books I read
3.3.3. Code Syntax highlighting
3.3.4. Machine tags