Blog Software – Typepad vs. Radio Userland

How bloody appropriate.

Or, perhaps, more than serendipity, circumstance dictates that my very first post on e-strategy.com‘s new Internet marketing blog must be devoted to a comparison of the relative merits of two leading blog software systems: Typepad versus Radio Userland.

Here’s the deal: I’ve been flirting with moving from Blogger.com to a more flexible blogging platform for some months and only recently began seriously looking at my options only because I really wanted to try Onfolio.com (more on Onfolio in a forthcoming post) and in order to really put it through the paces, I needed to use it with a blog.

So that sorta forced my hand to figure out which blog platform I was going to use.

The three main features I needed were 1) the ability to segment posts by category, 2) the ability to podcast, and 3) price. Based on those three criteria, I chose Radio Userland. While I looked at Typepad–primarily because that’s what Micro Persuasion uses and I really like the way that blog is organized–Radio Userland only cost $40, which beats Typepad’s lowest price by ten bucks.

But after I bought and downloaded Radio Userland’s desktop blog publishing software, it quickly became apparent that I wouldn’t be up and posting anytime soon.

Oh. My. Gawd. The learning curve for Radio Userland is awfully steep and I really wasn’t looking to spend hours learning their system.

That forced me into the waiting arms of Typepad’s hosted solution, which satisfied two of my three criteria: 1) it categorized posts, and 2) even at $150/year for their full-featured hosted version, it was relatively cheap. I don’t know if it allows for podcasting, but I can do that using FeedBurner anyway, so no big whoop.

But most importantly, it’s so easy to use that two hours after opening an account, I’m up and posting on my new blog.

That’s what I’m talkin about.