Blogs can be differentiated in many ways.  Some of them are:

Genre of the blog:  Depends on which topic a blog addresses.  So we have Political blogs, Technology Blogs, Religious blogs, Fashion Blogs, Music blogs, Humor blogs etc.

Bloggers involved: Blogs could also be Personal blogs (which are about personal life and thoughts); Individual blogs (Blogs on different topics by individuals); Group blogs (Blogs by a group of individuals); Public Blogs (where the public at large writes and shares information and content on a certain topic).

Blog Media: Blogs can also be classified by the media used for them.  Blogs using videos as the medium to share content are known as vlogs.  Blogs which share photographs or images are known as photoblogs.  Blogs which share audio content are audioblogs.

Hosting of the blog:  Blogs could be self hosted or hosted on public hosting provided by different blog application providers.  The Self Hosted blogs usually use applications like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla for their websites and these are hosted by the blogger on their own servers or server space bought from the hosting companies.

The companies which provide hosted blogs – so blogger doesn’t have to deal with the hosting technicalities – provide the blog application on a cloud.  The different options are:

WordPress.com – This is the cloud hosted application from WordPress guys.  They provide a basic free alternative, and quite a few of premium features including some really cool themes.

DrupalGardens – This is the cloud offering from the Drupal folks.  One issue with a self hosted Drupal installation is the complexity of upgrading the core and the installed modules.  This cloud installation obviates that.  It has great features and also ability to customize the theme template.

Blog Platform:  Blogs are created on various platforms today.  The most popular platforms are.

Self Hosted: The self hosted blogs generally use the WordPress (from WordPress.org), Drupal (from Drupal.org) and the new entrant Ghost (from Ghost.org)

Hosted/Cloud Blogging:  We have already talked about the options for cloud or hosted blogging