Help me decide on a blog

I installed WordPress on one of my hosting plans about a year and a half ago. I never got beyond the “here’s my first blog post” just because of time constraints in general.

I’ve recently got the bug to start one up again, but now I notice that you can just start one on WordPress.com for free. Please educate me as I’ve been out of the loop for awhile.

I had the MySpace bug for awhile when my teen got me interested, but I quickly lost interest due to the crappy interface and slowness of MySpace page loads.

I then heard of blogs like Vox that look really nice and you basically just sign up and start blogging.

I’m really into customizing and making mine unique so I haven’t ruled out WP yet, but I’m finding people doing it just as well with the free accounts nowadays.

What I’m looking for is something like MySpace where you basically invite others and grow it that way. I would like to have a blog but have people (friends or “members”) comment with little avatars they can customize.

Of course I’m asking this on a WP forum, but I’d like to know honestly, for those who’ve tried all of them (or most of them) which way to go. I want to be able to somehow hook up my Google Reader favorites and be able to blog about it seamlessly.

Does WP offer any plugins that connect Google reader or even better, a way to get Google reader to show up in a page? I also of course want the ability to post video clips and mp3 playlists like “what I’m listening to now”.

Now, my confusion in all this is whether to have a traditional blog or those “microblogs” that I’m hearing about thats suited for transmission to something like the iPhone. Sort of a Twitter type of thing.

Please guide me because all these emerging technologies are making me dizzy and some days I just figure I’d just sign up for a free account instead….argggh!

Thanks for your help/advice!