Blogware has grown from its simple origins to an increasingly powerful content management solution.

As first, weblogs just supported basic features: time stamps for each weblog post, automatic archiving of old posts, automated header dates for the posts on a given day, permalinks that automatically gave its entry its own unique URL.

But in the past two years, there have been incredible advances in blogware functionality.   Now many blogware packages support advanced features like:

• Multiple databases
• Multiple templates
• Multiple users
• Draft status, and future posting
• Category support
• Data syndication

and much, much more.

Increasingly, there's only a thin layer of functionality separating blogware from low-end Content Management solutions.   Features like:

• Basic Workflow, so administrators can approve content and templates
• Permission Levels, so you can easily separate content editors from template designers
• Update Histories, so you can track whose updating what (and when)
• Multiple Types of Data, so you can do more than just post blogs (e.g. post Press Releases or Job Listings)

A blogging software company that adds those functionalities to basic blogware could start to eat away at Content Management market share on the low-end.     It's already starting to happen with corporate weblogs: knowledge management blogs, corporate communications blog, and marketing blogs are all making a splash in the marketplace without much participation from the low to mid-end content management systems.

WEBLOGS V. CONTENT MANAGEMENT

Much like the computing world, there will continue to be a role for the truly big Content Management systems: after all, IBM is doing well selling consulting services for its existing Mainframes and other Big Iron hardware.

The Weblogs versus CMS dilemma will probably unravel much like the PC versus Mainframes dilemma: at first it seemed like PC's didn't have significant market or revenue potential.   By the time the Mainframes caught on, PCs were a full-blown revolution and were beginning to match the price/performance of the powerful Mainframes.

But much like Personal Computers, weblogs are riding a whole new price/performance curve that threatens to move upscale into higher end solutions.  

In other words, weblogs are a violently disruptive force in the content management sector!