“Consider search. Can you instantly find everything -- at company, departmental, or workgroup scope -- that you’re allowed to see? I thought not,” asks Jon Udell in his InfoWorld article Reinventing the intranet.

“It ought to be the other way around. Inside the enterprise, teams, tasks, products, and services define metadata vocabularies that the Internet search giants would kill for. Exploiting those vocabularies to deliver search results that are better than what’s available on the open Web is low-hanging fruit. As we roll out SOAs that route well-formed messages through a fabric of intermediaries, it’ll get even easier. What Verizon’s CIO calls “Googling the enterprise” should be the rule, not the exception.”

Udell cites the advantages of social media – such as social bookmarking (see Social bookmarking the intranet) – for improving the total value and efficiency of the corporate intranet.

Check-out the recommended Ning a free online service for “cloning, customizing and sharing Social Web Apps.” This is an online service that allows you to create your own applications such as a blog tool, photo sharing tool, or ratings site – either from scratch or from ‘cloning’ another application already created on the Ning network. There are a couple of other options too.

Ning is the new pet of Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. I’m not entirely floored by this site or the clone tools but I’m very intrigued about the potential and possibilities. Though I think the potential for the intranet is far less limited given that Ning is an ASP model that will depend on advertising revenue. In the meantime, I think Ning will more appeal to the My Space audience which is typically a lot lower than IntranetBlog.com’s audience.

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Social bookmarking the intranet