21Publish is go
I have been playing with 21Publish for a bit now, after I got a mail from Torsten Jacobi some time back to have a go at it. What is it? It’s a self-serve hosting platform I’d say. You can get your blog platform based on TypePad or Blogg.de (not sure, I presume) and others, but the difference with 21Publish is that you get it in a self-serve manner. You sign up, and get a management interface for an entire platform, which allows you to give other people the option to sign-up for a blog within your platform easily. The first six months at the moment are free, so try it out. In the end, 100 users with 25 MB will be under $90, a very reasonable price I’d say (but I admit that I don’t know the others services prices).
The interface seems to be very powerful, with things like moblogging for users, hosting of pictures, and the option for templates for the management blog as well as for user blogs, limitable to those you want to allow (system set or your own). You also have a nice nested category system for all the stuff you will post to the management blog as well as statistics. You can also easily send a mail to all your users in a newsletter type system. Of course, RSS can be enabled for all users and you of course can point everything to a domain of your choosing.
Overall, a nice feature set for groups who want to set up their own blogs. I can already see this as a very nice thing for a football club to setup their own blogging platform, or for smaller companies to get their employees or customers to blog.
You could probably do all that with MovableType or a lot of other apps, but this one is a hosted and supported service. If you are thinking about getting a group of people blogging, I suggest you give it a look. There is also a German version at 21Publish.de and sadly the admin login is dependent on the domain you choose, but that shouldn’t be a real problem unless you want to put multilanguage systems on there.
I suggest you take a look and decide for yourself if this is for you. It’s really worth it.