To clear up possible confusion, blogger is also called blogspot. If you go to my blog in my sig, on blogspot.com and then click on the orange B in the upper left corner, it will go to blogger.com. Dunno why it uses two names and two domains like that, but it can be confusing. Maybe it was originally two blog sites and one bought out the other many years ago.
But anyway, there's also
http://livejournal.com that you mentioned, where I have a page and made a few posts years ago. I have the impression there's a lot of political blogs there, but blogger seems to be more popular overall (at least on AW!).
They're all pretty much free (there may be "extra features" they might charge for, but you sure don't need any of those to get started, and most people never need them), and the only "maintenance" I can think of is approving moderated comments on my blog (which I have set for comments to be moderated solely to stop spammers from posting).
It's REALLY no big deal at all. Signing up on a blog site and making a blog post is just about as easy as signing up for the Absolute Write Water Cooler forums and making a forum post, and it looks like you managed to do that!