bbPress.org

After a lot of research, and looking at tumblr, then wordpress, then joomla, and now wordpress and bbpress, I think I almost may have made a decision. I want to create a site that is a blog on the front end, with the blog topics becoming forum discussions. Technically I don’t need bbpress to do this, but it seems to me that bbpress will facilitate better discussion. First, are there other sites that are already doing this, I would love to see how they operate?

Second, and maybe most important to me are the user profiles and the ability to let other users ranks each other posts to comments. I’m looking for some opinions on which extensions do this the best.