The whole sidebar look you got going now is a little better I think.
With the blog integration I mean just to integrate the logins and such. So if someone logs into one thing they are logged into every aspect of your site.
So they can comment and such on the blog.
With the integration I meant to just integrate the users, not the blog posts (because that would be alot harder I think).
With the design...
Where do I start...?
I know, The colours. Theres alot of that 1 bright shade of blue and a very plain light grey (and white which is so close to the grey it's sorta categorized under the 'grey').
Maybe a softer shade of blue would help, but also maybe see what other colour would be nice to add.
Also, darker grey wouldn't hurt. lol
The gradients are... annoying.
The gradient should only be in the header of each uhh, news item? to draw attention to the name of that news item? and then the body of it should be simple to read. The background gradient (which you use as the border of it) isn't very nice.
Plus the gradients aren't very 'soft'. They are too different colours, so it clashes with the way you have those gradients.
That kind of gradient is better than what you have. :P
uhh, that's all I can think of right now...