WordPress is the best web-publishing platform I’ve encountered (certainly tons better than Blogger, although Blogger has the advantage of free hosting on blogspot.com). Full compliance with Web standards (so the developers claim, and I believe them), TrackBack, Pingback, no page rebuilds, pretty typography, smart text formatting, etc., etc. and so forth.
WordPress is open source freeware, but you do need your own web server to host it on. We’re paying $80 a year to use WordPress rather than Blogger or something, and it’s more than worth it.