Google bought the blogspot site, so if you have G-Mail you can set up a blog with very liberal space and design features. Your G-mail address doesn't need to be your blog name. I've heard about several books that came from blog origins (now that blogs are more than just the lunatic fringe).

I was at a web conference meeting today about writing for the web and using blogs. The one thing that doesn't fit my ideas of good writing is what they suggest for web writing--chopping everything into little one and two sentence "paragraphs" because people who are looking at the web scan in such a way that dense paragraphs drive them off, unless it is exactly what they were looking for. So if you can manage a few short sentences or a bulleted list to describe the contents of your blog, then those who are interested will wade in, and those who aren't interested won't. But at lease those who are interested will know from your introduction that the material is more dense than one commonly finds online (where five to eight lines is plenty for a "paragraph," thank you very much!)

Good luck!

SRS