WP or WP mu?

Folks,

An acquaintance recently introduced me to WordPress, recommending it as the platform I should employ for a website I have in mind to build.

I’m inclined to agree with him. I have been studying the Codex for a couple of weeks now, and am impressed with WP. Funny how things change but really don’t as time goes by. It’s all a database app really. Add, Edit, Delete, Report. Right up my alley!

Before I invest a whole lot of time attacking the learning curve I would like to know two things:

A) WP or WP mu?

The site I want to build would, if successful, involve thousands of accounts (some possibly by subscription) creating individual blogs. Those blogs would be rated by readers. High ratings and strong readership numbers would result in individual posts rising to the front page, which would essentially be an aggregation page.

I know WP allows for multiple bloggers, but isn’t this really a job for WP mu?

But if I read the dox right, MU creates SQL tables for each individual blogger. Wouldn’t this make aggregation a real pain, and slow it down considerably. I can’t imagine a query with thousands of joins.

Am I worried about nothing, or should I plan to write my own version of multi-user tables?

B) Finding individual’s blogs

If I read the dox correctly, WP can “interpret” incoming HTTP requests to single out a particular author’s posts so you can tailor an index page to contain just that blogger’s posts. Am I right?

So if I had a user named MrBlogger, a link that pointed to mrblogger.somedomain.com or somedomain.com/mrblogger would single out that user?

TIA for any advice to a pre-newbie,

Ed Tiley