News of the death of the Learning Management System might be a little premature.

OK there are many free services on the net that can replicate the functions of an LMS but do any of them provide a coherent base from which to deliver your online courseware across the entire enterprise? If you answer yes then go right ahead but I think, for many of us, life is a little more complicated. For me personally I love the collection of tools that I have cobbled together that allow me to do things with online courses that were not dreamed of a few years ago,and most of which are free or open source. But that does not mean that they represent a solution for the entire organisation or for your students.
I personally think that some people don't believe that learning should be managed at all and from that ideological base evangelise the merits of this or that small application that allows you to replicate some of the functions of the LMS without installing anything. If you follow that line of thinking then KEWL the marvellous open source project from South Africa doesn't make the cut. To me that is utter nonsense. Have a look sometime if you haven't already, at the type of courses they offer from that server and tell me why this project does not have intrinsic value. You simply cannot do it.
There is also the larger picture to consider. This is something I have been thinking about a bit lately. Many commentators and lots of supporters of online learning are glowing in the praise of blogs as a new means of democratising the dissemination of information and challenging the old order of centralised publishing control. All this is true and I think it is great. But, so far as I can see much less has been said about the the way these new applications centralise the means of publishing and it's format. Think of the quirky often tragic layouts of the early personal websites and you will see what I am getting at. With the new blogging technology these are far less likely to occur.
Much more fundamental is the issue of the ownership of the technology. Instead of personal websites we now are looking at sites or blogs situated on a small number blog servers which usually operate from a commercial imperative. It's a little bit like the death of the corner store replaced by the servo or the supermarket. Everything changes but we need to think about the consequences of those changes. Concentration of ownership is just as dangerous if it is the content of the information that is at stake as it is for the means of it's dispersal. So before you evangelise the use of blogs in education or whatever other widget you have dug up think about the consequences of it's implemention. You might be thinking educational usefulness it's developer might be thinking of dominating a market.