In your experience, which is better, Word Press or Tyepad (for those of you who have experience with both).

I would recommend WordPress. Most of all because it is a free platform. It is also feature rich and if you ever strike it big and want to hire a developer, than that developer can modify WordPress (by building plugins) to your heart's content.

If you create a blog at wordpress.com, you get the added benefit that the updates are taken care off for you (something that is also a compelling feature of Typepad, a paid for service). However, updating WordPress is only a click of a button, doesn't require technical knowledge, so there is really no reason why you shouldn't host WordPress on your own servers.

I can't really think of any benefit that Typepad might offer that Wordpress can't do better... Love to hear about it though if anyone out there disagrees...

One feature that the free version of Word Press does not have is letting you run ads (Google's and otherwise). I wonder why they are so picky about that?

They probably want a piece of the pie, one way or another. That's how business tends to work.

You CAN offer ads on a self-hosted WordPress blog. But if you want to run google ads on a hosted blog, you are better off with Blogger. It's free, very user friendly, and allows you to run Google Adwords.

Lorenz how can one convert a hosted wordress blog to a self hosted one..do explain