Are Blogs well suited to the Online Classroom?

In my previous post I asked the question "What makes a good Blog post? ". Now I am wondering if blogs are well suited for the online classroom. Don't get me wrong, I glad that we are using them in class, it's just as someone who is thinking of being an educational software developer I am wondering how this technology could be improved to better suit the educational environment.

Basically it seems that blogs are a technology that can enhance online education but if you were going to design this technology from scratch( or redesign it) for education it might have some different qualities.

Here some things I might add:

• A way for the teacher to have some editorial control over all blogs in a class.(More so for K-12 students)
• Prepackaged page that has feeds and links to all the blogs in the classroom.
• Ability for blogs to be set in class mode were only comments made class students as opposed to all web users show up.
• Ability for the teacher to easily analyze each student's usage of the their blog and their participation in other student's blogs.
• Ability to export all course blogs into one archived file for record keeping.
• Ability for the teacher to make assignments then have simple way to for the students tag a post or group of posts as related to the assignment.

What are some other ways blogs could be tailored for educational purposes.?