Ten Reasons Why

I think that part of the problem is that sofwtare companies are trying to sell us a truck (at full sticker price) by trying to convince us that it's a hammer ('it has all the functionality of a hammer, and so much more!')

You can't go out and just buy a hammer if you need a hammer. You have to buy an 'integrated solution'. And you can't buy it. You have to license it. On a per-seat basis.

Stephen, I think your generalization may be even more egregious than the one of mine to which you are responding. :-)

There are certainly many open source learning solutions out there as alternatives to commercial integrated solutions, as well as many "non-integrated" free individual tools.

So if "evil corporations give us no choice" explains some people's attempt to turn weblogs into a solution for everything under the sun, I would say it's a mis-perception on their part, not a representation of the actual status quo.

I think you have to realize that for most people, a weblog is the first actual content management system they've run into, as well as the first comprehensible application of XML (RSS). I hope that as people bump up against the practical limits of weblogs that a middle tier of content management tools (below the enterprise-class bohemoths) will be accessible to them. Zope and Frontier would seem to be the best examples of the type.

At my school they had implemented some horrendous ASP driven sql server based POS which had every feature known to man, but was just so idiotic that the school ended up giving on it.

Somehow it seems that while all these academics were sitting around taking a very high level approach to what needed to be done [just read any of the descriptions of the freely available courseware systems on their websites] they missed out the fact that these are all essentially websites with some sort of easy to publish system. For example, despite being somewhat web-savvy, I had to read the following description thrice to grasp it:

Segue is based on a publishing model of content delivery which regards faculty not as course managers but as authors and/or editors and students as contributors/collaborators. Indeed, Segue encourages the publication of course work (where appropriate) and opens the classroom to the world community. At the same time, Segue allows for a site to become a personal workspace, where site owners can develop ideas in a private web-based environment accessible anywhere; or a community workspace, where individuals or groups can share ideas amongst only themselves.

Segue is browser-centric and relies on hyperlinks to provide both site navigation and organization. Built into its interface is a customizable three level navigational structure. This means that a given site can be organized into sections each of which can contain any number of pages. Pages in turn can contain any number of independent timestamped content blocks (text, images, file downloads). These content blocks can be sorted by recent first or recent last, or can be sorted by user's who added or edited them, sorted alphabetically or sorted by some custom ordering.
>>Segue

In simple English, the above is a very good description of a weblog.

As for bumping the upper limits of weblog software, you would be suprised at how high they can go! Since they mostly use Apache+mysql to serve content, they should withstand high load levels better than humongous software with huge overheads.