AOL Journals review

Not wanting to miss out on the blogging juggernaut, AOL recently made its new blogging service, AOL Journals, available to the public (that is, non-AOL members). While AOL Journals has features similar to those of Blogger and TypePad, we found the presence of banner ads on the posted blogs distracting and not suitable for business use. If you want only to share your personal thoughts with friends, AOL Journals is good starting point, otherwise we recommend the paid service TypePad for professional-looking blogs.

Before you start, you'll need an AOL username. If you are not already an AOL or AOL IM member, getting a username you want with AOL Journals can be a challenge, as millions of people are already AOL members and the username you want is most likely taken already. However, AOL can help suggest a username for you, which is often close to what you wanted.

Creating an AOL Journal is free, and it's a simple process that requires only a few steps. You'll need to answer questions, such as whether you want a private or public journal and what the name of the journal will be. Then you'll need to provide a brief description, select a community that your journal can belong to, and decide whether you want a simple setup or you want to ask AOL to give you more choices for color, layout, and other design tweaks. You can change your formatting choices later if you feel your blog needs a face-lift. Finally, you'll need to tell AOL how you want your journal to look, what links you want in it, and other minor formatting issues.

AOL's WYSIWYG editing section, like other blog services', works well, but we were particularly impressed with the instant message integration that AOL offers, letting users post to their journals via AOL IM. This is a nice addition. Unfortunately, AOL won't allow you to use custom HTML in your journal and gives only rudimentary formatting options, such as the columns and the links that appear.