One of the most commonly mentioned shortcomings of blogging on ActiveRain has been the lack of customizability of the platform of members blogs.  We work to create a very easy to use platform for the real estate industry and never intend or do intend to compete with the feature sets of other blogging platforms such as Wordpress or Moveable Type.  But based on feedback we feel it's important to give members more branding optons to create a sense of ownership over their blogs without affecting the community.

Currently under development is a more customizable blogging platform for ActiveRain members to get both the benefits of being part of a community such as ActiveRain and have their content appear on their "own" blog.

This new platform will:

• Allow members to host their blogs on their own domain name or as a sub-domain of one of our sites.
• Allow members to customize the look of their blogs including using different templates, changing logos and color schemes.
• Members will be able to manage multiple blogs through the ActiveRain Real Estate Network, choosing which posts are published to which blog.  In a similar way as selecting how to publish posts to groups or Localism.com
• Comments can be shared between blogs so you only have to manage them from one place.
• Allow members to maintain all of the current benefits they get from posting to ActiveRain such as SEO, and maximum exposure for their content.
• Make it easier to post multi-media content such as videos and pod casts.
• Provide a cost effective hosted blogging solution that requires almost no time to setup.

We are still in development with this solution so any feedback/feature requests are greatly appreciated, and we'll try to incorporate it into the final solution.