Building Big Blog Communities

Following up on Social Software Interfaces, I’ve been looking around at different classes of software (blogs, wikis, collaboration spaces, social softs) to help self-identify, self-create and self-publish a large, de-centralized global community. While outsourcing to a “private label” Blogger, TypePad or LJ (if they had it) might be an option, it seems silly even considering it with all the amazing open source tools out there once you abstract infrastructure and admin.

The problem is, most blogging software is great for running a personal weblog but starts to break down when you are talking about a community of users. What you need, is a “TypePad in a box.” The University of Warwick’s eLab has put together BlogBuilder to handle exactly this sort of thing for their student population. There is a nice flash overview of what a blog is and what you’d want one for. Looks like a lot of usability work has gone into the software and it looks quite polished and impressive. Auricle has a nice overview (dead link) of the software too from an edu perspective.

Now, when are they open sourcing the code?

By the way, anyone who has suggestions to other things I should be looking at, please comment.