how about.. not a blog in the traditional sense, but posting into a specified forum that only admins can create topics for (or give roles to), and that topic showing up as a blog entry on the front page of a site. in the forum itself, if people post comments into it, then on the front page it will show "35 comments" and when they click that, it takes them to the forum posting with all the comments.
that make sense?
actually punbb has this and i thought it was pretty cool. check punbb.org's front page.
I was already thinking of something like this. It would have to work in the same sense as the rss feed. However for a closed or private blog/forum feeding out to an open rss is another challenge in itself.
This is exactly what I want for a site I am building currently... and also what I've tried to explain (possibly not very eloquently) in 2 other discussions so far.
I was just thinking... with multiple tags, you could have separate scripts pulling different keywords out of your feeds and posting them to multiple blogs. I know a few people who are running three or more weblogs on their own, as well as a few group blogs.
With the right modifications to vanilla, you could run them all from the forum. Like a one-person Gawker Media, but with a consolidated user base community. Regular members can post comments to all the posts you choose to allow comments on, and post threads to selected categories. As admin you have the option of elevating good posts to live-blog status. Then there can be member roles assigned so your friends can contribute to group blogs with varying levels of trust, as well as allowing them to act as forum moderators.