Forget about automatic translators for now. They're dumb and they massacre the target language, making any content look ridiculous.

I think we have two separate problems here. One is content and link integration. The other is language translation. Some random thoughts:

1. The person writing a diary does not have to be the person translating the diary. We already have people who translate outside content because they think it's interesting enough to share. Translating internal content is the same problem.

So all it takes to spread good content around is some volunteers willing to translate - say - a French posting into German if they find it interesting enough.

2. Network integration bvy degrees is probably not a a problem that can be solved.

I'm tempted to axe the idea of differentiating local and and remote blogs altogether. How about amalgamating incoming streams into a user-selected ÜberBlog, with language, source and locality selected as a tag/search attribute/whatever?

If you're sharing logins, sharing Wikis, and sharing content, you might as well go the whole hog and just merge everything. Use one distributed interface for access, and make it customisable with a bit of localisation for different reader groups.

This gives you instant syndication. Authors can decide which tags and labels they release diaries with. Readers can decide which streams they want to read, based on those tags and labels - which could include a blog name, a language, an author, any of the above, or something else entirely.

The 'blogs' are now search criteria entered via login portals. But in theory any diary can be shared across the network instantly.  

And the ET hive mind sits in the middle, amalgamating and distributing everything. (Or rather, organising the amalgamation.)

It's round about here that someone is going to say 'But Scoop doesn't do that.'

Indeed, it doesn't. But if we're going to start networking things, is Scoop still the right platform for that? If we start building something ambitious with it now, will there be problems building the network later?

If you give readers the choice to decide which tags they want to read, it's much more useful to them than giving them a choice about which blogs they want to read. It also minimises duplication, because the diary can be in one place instead of copied between many.

And I don't necessarily want to have to log into a different blog to read and comment on an interesting diary. (Etc.)

I can see some problems with this approach - will it delete the community feel? - but I think it's at least worth considering as an option.