With the new Forum Content Navigator coming in AF 4.3, I'm looking at ways that would make configuring Active Forums easier for User Blogs w/ Active Social.  In the past, some customers have created individual forums per user.  That is still a possibility but I think there is a better way.  If we used one forum to hold all blogs a couple things would need to change.

Already added in AF 4.3
My Topics needs to be a real topics list instead of the what's new control.  You will be able to customize the My Topics just like a regular list of topics.  This includes paging and possibly viewing the topic within the tab.

Need to generate a list of bloggers.  This would allow you to create a blog page where visitors could see all topics and then filter by author, tags and categories. 

Things to consider
Categories and tags wouldn't be shared across all bloggers.
Moderation is still controlled by forum.  This means all users would be moderators for that forum and could moderate other posts.  Obviously you would only want the topic owner to moderate/approve comments for their own topics.  This is the only drawback I can see at this time.  I can already see a few ways to allow for this capability, but need to do some testing and improve moderation tools.

Hi Will,

Would it be possible to include current/existing blogs of users by reading a feed? This would be convenient because a lot of users probably don't want to maintain multiple blogs. I know that AS contains the feed possibility but I think it would be nice to include this in the forum based blogs. I hope that you will add a journal type in Active Social for this (New Blog & Replies) to still have it on activity page.

Thanks in advance.

Blogs are the reason for my visit here today. I was looking to see if there was something available at AS 'cuz I feel the ability to blog is something people expect, especially on a social site. I'm glad to hear something is in the works or at least being considered.

The moderation issue you mentioned above is a biggie. I feel the blog needs to be that person's personal space and no one can touch it or even see it if the owner doesn't want them to.

To be honest, (and I'm not being critical) I'm not so sure it wouldn't be a better idea just to develop a separate module or plugin altogether, then the time you spend trying to come up with workarounds could be spend on making an already working base system even better. I'm sure there are certain expectations regarding blogging software and those could be determined by visiting some of the more popular spots on the net. No need to reinvent the wheel or try to find a way to make a square one (forum) round (blog).

You already have the best social software out there and adding a nice comfortable, user-friendly, blogging feature would just make it even better AND without a whole lot of strain and pain on your part. BUT that's just my humble but most accurate opinion. :>)

PS. Now if you really want to kick it up a notch and provide a feature that only one company is even coming close to, it would be that ability to award and track points for visiting various places on a site. That would give us some ability to steer traffic on the site and use as a revenue or traffic generator...but I digress.....blogging is good too (as in also).

Thanks a heap for all you do, btw, and keep up your usual good work.