Looks like the big news tonight is about the new Microsoft service (in beta): MSN Spaces. Just for kicks I signed up for an account, http://spaces.msn.com/members/josephscott/. Looks like they are going after Blogger with a blog feature plus some others that work in conjunction with MSN messenger. The news broke over at Scripting News about MSN Spaces with plenty of links. They support feeds in RSS 2.0 format. This could be a very powerful tool if they make their API open so that people can build tools around it (ala flickr).
I doubt that I personally would ever give up running blog on a server that I don’t have some measure (if not complete) control over.