Competition in the hosted blog arena has ratcheted higher in the last couple of weeks, with the launch of the latest version of Squarespace's Web publishing platform. Squarespace Version 5 has generated excitement and good word of mouth, and ups the ante with its mix of simple administration and robust functionality.Like Blogger.com, Wordpress.com and Six Apart's TypePad and Vox.com, Squarespace is a hosted solution. And while it seems that its sweet spot is blogging (its WYSIWYG editor is excellent), it has a broad set of functionality intended to support more complex sites.

While some people have focused on what Squarespace isn't (it's not open source, and it isn't free) the platform offers a compelling set of functions and reasonably-priced hosting options. The Achilles' heel of some hosted blogging tools -- particularly the free ones -- is that they tend to have somewhat limited capabilities and they make it tough (or impossible) to extend their base functionality with plugins. The good news is that Squarespace Version 5 comes to the table with a robust set of integrated modules.

On the content creation and management side, these include the previously mentioned blogging capabilities, photo gallery support and a slick Form Builder, which is great for capturing user-submitted data. Also key is the powerful, built-in anti-spam function, which means a third-party plugin, such as Akismet, TypePad AntiSpam, or Mollom, isn't needed.

Squarespace also supports a number of community-centric features, such as user registration, forums, and easy to use file upload and download capabilities.

With a robust, flexible feature set, intuitive administration, and lots of built-in and customizable template options, Squarespace V5 is a compelling platform, and certainly worth consideration for blogs or modest content-driven sites. It's not yet as advanced or flexible and a full-blown content management system like Drupal or Joomla, but with its rapid pace of adding new features, it's nipping at their heels.