Help from you expert bloggers out there?

Well it's been a while since I blogged, the awful events that have happened in the Indian Ocean have been pre-occupying my mind and so my personal responses have been taking my creative energy.

Now to my question, I want to host a couple of blogs for work purposes but we want them to be private 'dark blogs' as Suw would call then and we want people from different companies to join in. So we cannot host them on our intranet, but internet hsoting is a of course public.

Now we can password protect blogs in the TypePad service - but that password protects the RSS feeds too and I don't think Bloglines or other aggregators can handle that.

Is that true?

I thought of a wiki but I think they are clumsy to use, we really want journal type blogs so these people can follow each others days at work.

So any suggestions on how to host 5 blogs, so no-one and no-thing (Google) can access them or see them apart from the five, but an externally hosted RSS aggregator (e.g BlogLines) can somehow read the feeds from them  - via user-id passwords?

Help much appreciated and beers (or beer quivs) will be bought for all useful contributions.