Just yesterday Glen and I were talking about what balance to strike between multi-author weblogs and individual weblogs on our intranet. I think that eventually we would evolve our blogs on the intranet to single-author but enable some way to port or otherwise indicate certain of their posts for diffferent teams the writer might be on. We use MovableType and had not yet come up with an elegant way to do this that still met our needs (it is partially a taxonomy challenge, of course!).

The new MT TrackBack might fit the bill:

Multiple “authors” without author accounts

Say you want to have your readers contribute to your blog, but do not want to add them as an author; either because you want to limit the number of authors or you don’t want the work of having to add new people each time someone wants to post something interesting. Or, you may not want their posts to “weigh” as much as your official set of multiple authors.

With TrackBack, you can set up a section of your site to receive pings.

Kristine, one of our beta-testers, used her site, The Red Kitchen, as an example:

“If I had a category named ‘Red Kitchen Guests’ and allowed pings to it… then anyone with an MT blog could post a recipe on their page and ping my guest category. Then it could automatically list a ping link and excerpt on the Guest category page.”

With this we could set up team weblogs that just gather TalkBack pings from team members who are writing klog entries. Ideally I would like for individual writers to set one or more of their categories to auto-ping relevant team klogs when a new entry of that category is posted. I’m not sure that TalkBack supports category auto-pinging right now but maybe we could do it somehow via category templates.

I’m looking forward to experimenting with this.