I wanted to mention Lars' blog, but Lars beat me to the post earlier today.
I not only like the UI... but the content as well!
I have been secretly looking at lars-blogger and lars-ratings... waiting.
I do have some experience running a community using Weblog software (the European Medical Students' Association) and it works pretty well (yet I have not advertised the fact that we have a really easy to use content management software in that community, because I am waiting for something better... cough cough).
The software I am using for the community is based on Frontier (I am sure most have heard of it) created by Userland (a company that I am sure we can learn a lot from). They have been pushing XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS, and OPML for years. The software not only has XML-RPC based content management functionality but also some nice features in the area of membership, discussion groups, and ratings. I use the discussion groups on our pages as an editorial room. I moved the site to the platform more than a year ago because I did not have the time to support content creators anymore. The content management features in Frontier made it possible for anyone to post information (give a couple of people a 20 minute HTML course... make them editors... they get mails from the server when an author posts... they correct the bad HTML and approve the posts).
Sadly I have not had the time to scratch the surface of some of the things that make Frontier so interesting (the XML-RPC/SOAP part of it)... the fact that this software is teeming with standard based hooks and handles that can be called over the net makes it worth looking at. I hope to see web-enabled standardized hooks and handles hanging out of OpenACS/dotLRN soon.
