I know this questions comes every now and then, but I'm curious to know what your thoughts are in terms of starting a blog (personal or for your startup) which platform would you choose.
The best blogging platform is the one you'll use. It sounds silly, but what it means is forget about any that take a bunch of time to set up or maintain.
I think fully hosted solutions are great because you can spend basically zero time setting up and maintaining backend. Wordpress hosting is good. Squarespace also has a pretty slick solution.
I have no complaints with the open source self-hosted WordPress. You see the benefits of a great platform, together with the benefit of owning and controlling your site.
I've found blogger.com a little faster than wordpress.com and the latest UI is quite good. You can also put a domain on it for no charge (unlike wordpress.)
Jekyll just generates static html, so you can host it anywhere.
Honestly, this is the best suggestion, here. You can build anything you want with jekyll and never have to worry about stupid mysql/php crap ever again.
I think fully hosted solutions are great because you can spend basically zero time setting up and maintaining backend. Wordpress hosting is good. Squarespace also has a pretty slick solution.