I have been working for a while to get this wpmu site up and running to my / the company's specifications. It's niche, is technology or "IT" related blogs and it is based out of Canada.
http://blogs.itworldcanada.com
Is finally up and running and is now featuring real content. Currently we are in phase 1 where all the writing and blogs are created in house so that we can control what goes into the blogs and work out any kinks / write good documentation for when we open it up to outside bloggers.
When we do launch phase 2 we will be straying a little bit from the basic wpmu setup in that not just anyone can get thier own blog. Why? simply because we want to keep bloggers writing about similar topics in one blog so that instead of 10 blogs about security we could have 10 bloggers on one security blog with a lot of post and multiple catergories to make the whole site more navigable and information more accesable to users.
Had some fun with modifications and plugins with this project.
http://www.atypicalhomeschool.net/wordpress-plugins/ah-recent-posts-mu.txt (thanks Andrea) was an amazing starting point for my home pge recent posts "aggregator". you can see the modified version here:http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/code/ah-recent-posts-mu-mod.txt
Peter custom anti spam -for a captchca image.WP plugin taht works in the plugins folder.
WP-PostRatings -Rating functionality also had to be installed in plugins.
Simple tagging -Tag / related / highest post functionality.
HeadSpace meta data -Seo plugin
Thanks to all the developers and all the forum users who helped me along the way. (even Dr. Mike although his comments are usually mean they are always right)...