Okay, that’s not my official answer but the Web Developer’s Handbook is an amazingly thorough link list of resources for designers and coders. My official answer to a noob who really wants to learn the right way would be to start here.

Get your blog…if you use one that is hosted elsewhere, you can be
set up in about 2 minutes.
http://wordpress.com/ (they host for you. you can also install the
software on a server yourself, that site is http://www.wordpress.org
and that is what I use)
http://www.blogger.com/start another very popular blogging system.

If you don’t host your own blog, or even if you do, managing photos
is easy and fun with Flickr. In fact, some people use Flickr as their
blog…they just create a “group” and discuss things there or add
really long notes/descriptions to their photos.
http://www.flickr.com/

Once you start blogging, if you meet other bloggers and you want to
keep track of them, instead of remembering to visit a bunch of sites
you can just subscribe to their content using a feed reader (any blog
software you use will automatically generate feeds). Btw, you can
subscribe to the NYT, Seattle-PI and content like that too.

http://www.rojo.com – a new one, I switched from Bloglines.
http://www.bloglines.com – probably a little more stable, rojo is
new, but not as cool!

“I have been told today that I need to set up a blog for [an event] by Monday, and I have no experience in blogging whatsoever. Here are the requirements:

1. Multiple editors
2. Ability to make a page template that looks like our site
3. The ability to redirect the blog URL so it appears to be coming from our own website

Your easiest bet is to go with Blogger or WordPress. I set up a
Blogger blog for a band many years ago and here you can see it
incorporated into their site with no problems:
http://www.jessesykes.com/notes/index.html

In this case there’s only one author, but they do support multiple authors:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=20

The wordpress.com public docs are pretty sparce, but I just logged in
to one I set up in 30 seconds to show people how easy is it (I’m not
kidding about the 30 seconds) and you can set up multiple blog authors
with different levels of authority with the click of the button. In
general I would say the admin area looks almost identical to the one
you install and host yourself:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_Design_and_Layout

I started with Blogger, it’s super easy, and you can always import to
Wordpress later if you wanted. (Most blogs allow export/import so
don’t worry too much about your first choice). You can customize the
look with both but I think that WordPress offers you more
power/flexability as there are a lot of plugins and documentation on
tweaking it – of course that means more to learn/read too.

There are other choices as well, but I don’t have experience with them
(except for MovableType, which I didn’t care for in comparison).

It’s is seriously so easy to set up…you should try both and see what
you like better and what looks easier to adapt to your site.

Oh, for the record, typepad is very popular as well. And to clarify, wordpress.com (hosted) is to wordpress.org (you install on your own server) what typepad is to movabletype.

To expand on why I prefer WordPress to Movabletype/Typepad, all the following are true of WordPress:

• All services are completely free, the software is completely free.
• It’s easier to install on your server (if you go that route – it was way easier for me anyway…)
• WordPress is supported by a huge and rabidly enthusiastic community – this equals free support and hundreds of cool plugins that you can use to extend and customize your blog.
• Movabletype may have improved since I used it, but I must say, since the release of Wordpres 2.0 and the Askimet plugin (installed by default), I have virtually no blog spam. If your blog ever gets hit you’ll understand why this is so important!