Tapping into a workforce of knowledge
The world of corporate information and social networking are not just on a collision path, their already traded paint once or twice.
I think there are some interesting differences - and thus challenged - to social networking and social software in business settings. One of the obvious requirements is often “professionalism”. This takes on two facets - “identifying the author / source” and “regulating the content”. The second is handled, in part by the first - authors are more likely to self-sensor when they can not hid behind anonymity. The rest is better left to proper behavior guidelines rather than technology to control appropriate content.
Regarding Web 2.0 and social software, I find that people are often captivated by the use of these concepts and tools in the consumer market. While some technologists are skeptical, there are also a growing number of people that are wondering how such practices and technologies could be applied internally and whether such use could bring about some degree of business transformation – especially in terms of leveraging worker know-how and collective insight.
Source: Collaborative Thinking: Getting Over “Fear-Of-Blogs”
However, getting content authored is less than half the problem. The real challenge is “discovery”. All the collective wisdom of the company, logged in wikis, blogs, profiles, and repositories is useless until people can find it.
“Search” is the holly grail of social content. Internet wikis and blogs are covered very will by the monster search engines. And content providers can even choose to make the better and more accurate by registering their new content with the search services. But (and this is huge) most companies intranet site search solutions suck - yes suck!
Solve search and you unlock all that hidden gold.
RSS and Atom feeds are not the solution - at least not directly. Feeds allow users to monitor information and sources they already know about. But they can do more.
Let’s assume we have that really awesome search engine in our enterprise. How it got there is up to the IT guys 
. Now let’s assume it’s got a programmatic interface - preferably REST based or even the venerable CGI method. Finally, wrap that interface into a feed generator. Ding - Ding - Ding - Ding ! Users can choose to perform ad-hoc searches for content but they can also subscribe to topics of interest just by composing a “search feed” and loading it into their favorite feed reader.
Some of this “search aggregation” is already out there. But it limited in capabilities and narrow in content focus.
It all comes back to the discovery engine. The more accurate the search and ubiquitous its reach, the better the results.
… Of course, that reach can go too far <grin> (but that is a different post)
