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So a blog is generally a ball linking structure. (if you read the books you would know about this term)
But lets think about other sites, and how you can cheat a little when using 3rd party articles (duplicate content).

Using 3rd party articles, you are forced to have an external link.

There are 2 ways of doing this, and it is not really discussed in either ebook.

1. Limit the amount of PR that is given to the pages, thus you might have the link to the articles sitemap on your main sitemap.

This strategy is ok if you mainly want the articles to sacrifice PR, but they still have quite a PR leak.

2. Use ball linking from any 3rd party article page, minimising the value of any external link from the page

Thus have lots of links to related content that doesn’t have PR leaks, minimising the amount of PR that is “wasted”.

Apply it back to blogs

If you use “no follow” for all your comments (or not allow comments), and “no follow” on all external links, then you can do some great optimization, but would probably be unpopular. It would still be quite complicated to achieve various “spider” or “pyramid” solutions.
If you use “no follow” in comments, and not for external links, and optimize your site carefully, you might end up giving too much PR away to the other site.

If you don’t use “no follow” at all, that is a lot of leaks. PR however flows equally, thus if a page has a lot of comments on it, and has a lot of links, you need to have as many leaks to your own pages as possible. It is better to give PR to pages without too many leaks.

Even using a Blog as a CMS with no comments – you are going to need at the very least lots of special custom templates.

Short term solution

Popular blogs are better off having at least a partial ball structure, with so many internal links on a page that it doesn’t matter about the external links.

Think about your average number of comments and external links per post. Then decide how much PR you want to give away. If you have 10 external links on your page and want to give away only 10% of the page PR to them, you need to have 100 internal links of your own on the page.
Tagging and categories can help a lot if used correctly. Blogrolls on every page can be extremely bad. It is much better to “share the juice” by posting about your friends from an SEO point of view, than having them on your sitewide blogroll all the time.

The implementations for widgets for any theme I have seen so far really don’t help you very much.
PLR (private label rights) is the best content for sacrificial mininet sites, as it is easy to sacrifice with no 3rd party outbound links.

Post your most important content as pages rather than posts using modified templates.

Long term solution

;)

Update August 2010

For the last year Google have been suggesting PageRank evaporates from Nofollow links – so you will just have to use javascript, or test what Google claim.