Wow. I installed WordPress a few minutes ago, and the whole process was one of the easiest and quickest blog installs that I’ve ever done. I can probably set up a MT blog in my sleep. Blosxom just takes a few minutes but lacks Whizzy menus and user-friendly stuff. It was as simple as uncompressing WordPress, creating a MySQL database, editing about 4 fields in a php file and a few configuration clicks.
It was really quick. It’s really slick.
It’s set up for mutli-author blogging out of the box. It does trackback, pings weblogs.com, and does all of the basic things that I can think of out of the box. The RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds that it generates all validate. The templates do included a good bit of embedded PHP, so they are going to be harder to edit than your standard Movable Type template. The default template is okay but not particularly beautiful. It could always be worse.
It looks like they allow per-blog and per-post geolocation data in the form of lat/long. I haven’t seen much done with this in the blog that is produced, but I’m not looking very hard. Of course many evil and interesting things can be done with such data.
I would peg WordPress (which is derived from the b2 codebase) at a little more advanced than your Livejournal/blogger/hosted blog and around the same level of complexity/flexibility of Movable Type. It does require PHP and MySQL, though both of those can be found in less expensive shared hosting. I’m not going to move my daily blogging to it, but I am definitely going to poke around.