What's the best free blogging host? It's the Coke-Pepsi question that comes up repeatedly in Cyberspace, each with pros and cons.

Common opinions are: Wordpress doesn't allow JavaScript or AdSense... Blogger is owned by Google which could boot you if they don't like the content... Wordpress has a better forum... Blogger is easier to use... the arguments go on and on.

When I wrote, How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free, a whopping 7 months ago, the deal-clincher was the stat-monitoring with Wordpress compared to nothing from Blogger. (Twas hard to believe since it's owned by Google which freely offers Google Analytics.) Well, that's all changed and the debate continues.

Way, way back in July 2010 (man, I'm so out of it) Blogger introduced this feature and quietly added it to existing blogs. Yes, I didn't even notice until a few weeks ago. Now I can peruse traffic numbers, which posts are most popular and where people are coming from.

Blogger breaks up the page into four sections: Overview, Posts, Traffic Sources and Audience. Wordpress has seven: Visits, Referrers, Top Posts and Pages, Search Engine Terms, Clicks, General and Incoming Links.

A comparison of categories:

Overview and Visits- similar for both sites reporting visitor numbers by day, week, month and all-time. Blogger has the extra feature of near-live results for each hour within a day. Not hugely important but kinda fun to see what happens after a post or trying to figure where a burst of recent visitors came from. Advantage barely to Blogger.

Posts and Top Posts/Pages- both report each posting and the number of views by popularity. Advantage neither.

Traffic Sources and Referrers- handled differently as Blogger combines Referring Sites, URLs and Keywords to give a rundown of the ways visitors find your blog. Wordpress just lists the referring URLs and puts Search Engine Terms and Incoming Links in a separate category. I find this of marginal value; often they lead me places where I cannot determine a link to my site and even wonder if it's a spam-bot in action. It's the Keywords that are most useful, as I get a feel for which search terms direct visitors. Additionally Wordpress has an Incoming Links category which only lists four links to my blog (strangely all are from my Blogger blog) which is a tiny fraction of the true total. This mistake could count against Wordpress, but really the advantage here is neither.

Audience- Blogger has a feature showing which country, browser and operating system the visitors represent. It seems to be grossly inaccurate since it only lists ten countries for my blog and the least common (Spain) has forty-eight visitors. There must be plenty of foreign visits from Australia, Canada and India to name a few that are suspiciously missing. It's good to know the browser types and operating software; that Internet Explorer and Firefox are the big players as well as Windows. Also fun to see a few visitors utilized iPhones, iPads and Blackberries to visit. Since Wordpress doesn't offer this, advantage Blogger.

Clicks- Wordpress has this category for what links people clicked to go elsewhere. This is smart as the most common clicks tell a blog owner what external sources visitors appreciate. Advantage Wordpress.

General- within the Wordpress tab of General is a subset for Subscriptions, people who have chosen to follow your blog. Could be a great way to contact others or look into networking possibilities. Advantage Wordpress.

Overall, these are fairly equal. If I had to choose, Wordpress would have the tiniest advantage in stats though it's still a toss-up. Because of my love for JavaScript gadgets, I'll probably remain teetering on Blogger's side of the fence.