Blogging ?? What ? And how?

[Sundeep Sanil]

If i'm correct, you need answers for following questions:
1. You wan't to create a blog free of cost.
2.
2. a. You want only your family & friends to use it.
2. b. You want only your friends & family to see it.
3. You want to keep it searchable in google & other search engines.

Sooo....

1. The best free blogging platform around is blogger.com & wordpress.com.
Both are easy to use & are too good for search engine crawling & SEO,
I recommend you to use wordpress.com (if you get huge amount of traffic in near future, you can include google adsense & earn money, buut you cant earn in free wordpress blog with adsense).
If you're planning to place ads in coming months, then go with blogger.com.
Both are the best. Highly recommended.

2. a. You want only you family & friends to use it.
If you want your family & friends to use it & upload stuff or write articles in your blog, you can grant admin access to them, by using their email id.
2. b. If you want only your friends & family to see it & NO ONE else.
Make your blog invisible to google & other search engines (both blogger & wordpress have this feature.)

3. You want to keep it searchable
By default its visible to search engines, once you create the blog & start uploading content/articles to it. Ping those pages using pingomatic.com or index those pages useing Google webmaster tools.