I've tried it out at my forums on sheepownage.com and its working quite well. Not as active as I hoped, but the users seem to be quite happy about the format thus far.

I've made it so that only the Blog Owner can post threads, but anyone even unregistered users can post comments/replies into the thread.

IMO its a fine temporary solution for the blog integration into vBulletin.

Agreed my users aren't that interested in advanced features, most just wanted a place ot rant and rave their thoughts.

Did you guys do any special modifications to templates or anything to make it more blog-like (is that even a word?)? ;)

Nah, I'm not worried about that stuff, I just want a simple easy to read place to post my thoughts.

Sounds like the true jury...our community users...really have spoken.

I think all this just comes down to getting what you pay for.

Hmmm... This might come very handy!

Thank you for the suggestion FASherman!

How about "microblogs" (or micro-blog, or mblog, or ?blog)? Microblogs are short lived blogs that people abandon, or have a preset life length. For example a vacation trip blog (ends once the vacation is over), or a surgery blog, or a sporting season blog, contest blog etc.

Excellent!

Now for the next piece to get this to the next level...

How about.. some sort of a "request blog" form which would allow queueing of requests for "blog space" from users, with all the appropriate fields filled in.

Then the admins, super-mods, etc can just say yes/no through a single click and the forum is created, rights set, user notified, etc!

THAT would be awesome! Any takers? I'll even throw a crisp 10 after this one, and a bag of apples.

I always liked the basic idea of simply using forums as blogs/journals and have set up a couple on alternativenation.net for tour diaries from a member there.
(example link)

It's not great but as an example of what inspired this thread it fits - it mainly just suited the quick set-up and needed integration for our New Posts users at the time though!

For 3.5 I've taken things a bit further using just the plugins and have almost managed to set up a system of one forum = blog for every user - filtering & sorting the thread results by userid. I think that would be much more practical than adding a forum for each user, a halfway house between completely no hacking and a fully fledged journal system add-on.

How do you guys allow your users to have mod positions in just their forums and nowhere else? I found that if I set a user as a moderator for their forum, they were also able to see into my mod staff forum.

I take it, I need to make a Blog Owners Usergroup?

You don't need to change a user's usergroup to make them a mod. :P

This thread is a hilarious read I gotta say LMAO ...Personally I still don`t see what the big thing is about these blogs ... Can`t ya just put your thoughts in a thread?

bare in mind I`ve yet to see one in action, I may change my opinion then :)