blocks in page content

i'm hunting thru drupal for a way to have a block displayed inline on a page; why? because on a page such as the network page, i'd like to have the latest blogs & members' news show up higher than at the end of the text. using the RH sidebar is an option but then there's a lot of blank space & the body of the page is very narrow (altho on this particular page i guess we could put the logos for the other branches also in the RH sidebar which would balance it a bit more ... )

but anyway, it could be that in a number of instances it's useful to include something like the latest news or blog posts in a little box at the top right, with the content of the page continuing below it. i've been trying to find a way to do this using a php snippet in the body of the page, but i can't find anything - do you know how it could be done?

& while hunting, i found a module called multiblock: http://drupal.org/project/multiblock which is maybe useful for us? since i've already had to do things like create a second recent blog posts block because i wanted it to appear at the bottom of the home page but in the RH sidebar of the magnetics group page.