Can I share an external hard drive across 2 machines both using Time Machine?

I have an iMac on Leopard and a MacBook on Snow Leopard and I want to use Time Machine to back up my iMac before migrating to Snow Leopard.
To do this I'm going to buy an external drive but before I buy it I want to check whether I can share this drive across my 2 machines both backing up using Time Machine.
Also from a drive capacity perspective is it sufficient that the external drive has the same capacity as the machine(s). If no then is there a multiplication factor that should be used.
Paul.. 

Hi Paul, you'll want to partition it into 2 Partitions, & ech {artition should be at least twice te size of the drive it's backing up, so 2*iMac's drive + 2*MacBook's drive for size.

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