Multiple blogs

Hello, I have been playing with WordPress since the day before yetserday, and, I must say that I am very impressed. I am still learning PHP, but, so far everything has run quite smoothly.
Now to my question:
Because my family live all over the world and we don’t get to see each other much, I would like to set up a family site, with one main page and several blogs, one for each family member that would like to participate.
My idea was to have a seperate install (and database) per person (this so that we can all have our own language, color settings etc.), with one main page linking to the seprate blogs.
Would it be possible to then link to the last X amount of ‘posts’, or even better all of the posts not yet read, with the list in order of posting (ie. not grouped per person) from the main page?
If anyone has any ideas, or examples, or even just to tell me this is the completely wrong way to go about it, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks in advance, Marcel.
ps. I hope I have formulated this clearly enough, I am usually not very good at writing exactly what I mean ??