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I think there needs to be some clarification. There is two types of "Free Blogging". There are Services and there are Software.
By Services I would assume you mean "Blogger", "WordPress.com", etc... These are not going anywhere, they are profitable and will be around tomorrow.
There is also "Free Blogging Software", or more specific Open Source CMS systems. The three main ones are Wordpress, Joomla and of course Drupal. All three will be supported well into the next version (and beyond), and can be installed on any hosting company you want.
Pagerank is directly effected by the URL, so sub URL's like xxx.example.com or example.com/xxx will get less pagerank then example.com! I also hear that Google checks the age and the registration times on a domain in determining page rank. Thus a Domain name that is registered for 5 years will get more page rank then a Domain name that is registered for 1. That goes for age too... A Domain name that's been around for 5 years gets more pagerank then one that's been around for 1.
If your going to spend the hundreds of hours needed to maintain and update a blog I suggest you install Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress on an independent hosting company and buy a Domain. I paid around $200 for 3 years of hosting and 5 years on My Domain Name from hostgator. The amount of time I spend on it, which is already 10 hours (not including the hundred or so hours in blogging time I spent) is rather large, so $200 is not much money and I wish I did it sooner.
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