Welcome Howard! It's great to see you posting to the forum. (As an aside, Howard is an old friend and a great hacker who I'm hoping to entice into the community.)
You're raising a chicken-and-egg situation, essentially. Many complex web apps (especially in the education arena) have both publishing and collaboration facets to them. So whether you start with a publishing app and add collaboration features or start with a collaboration app and add publishing features depends largely on your aims and what's easiest to do given what you already have to work with.
The larger context of this conversation is using blogs in an educational setting. So we start with a single person's journal (or blog) and add the ability for people to comment on it. Once we have that in place, though, if we step back and squint a little the blog app (functionally) looks a lot like a discussion board with minor tweaks to the permissions and the UI.
That, in turn, leads me to speculate that maybe what we need here is really one app for both blogging (or single-user-directed thinking out loud) and discussion boards (or community-centric thinking out loud). By aggregating the needs here, we may be able to come up with one base idea app and a small handful of parameters that can be tweaked to support a number of different educational goals.
