Mainly Mattias Ohlund

I was initially turned off by livejournal because of it's icky look and the in your face google ads but changing the theme made quite a difference. It's not quite so ugly, the ads are less predominant and I just discovered the account allows for 1 Gb storage. Not too shabby. It keeps posing my userpic for every post I make though.  That's annoying.

The Wordpress one - Pros: no ads, blog stats, feed stats, http://wordpress.com/features Cons: doesn't allow CSS formatting, only 50 MB allowed.