>I’ve been thinking a lot about intranets as a set of services rather than a destination website. This blog is an example of a service that could be set up as part of the ‘intranet’ experience. I should say that IBM has an amazing internal blogging system — literally tens of thousands of IBMers (including myself) participate there. And yet it’s all locked away behind the firewall. Sure, much of it is inside baseball and so it deserves to be just conversation among IBMers, but wouldn’t it be even more powerful if the stuff that doesn’t need that level of privacy could be externalized easily? I mean, here I am blogging outside the firewall anyway, and the benefit of it is only peripherally accruing to IBM. A company-managed external blogging system is one way to enable employees to demonstrate their expertise in ways that may actually attract more clients and build the brand image of your company. I am not even talking about an IT platform necessarily — the service could be simply orchestrating and employee-focused program to get them blogging. Show them how, provide the air-cover needed etc.
Same thing goes for tagging, social bookmarking, other kinds of content publishing etc etc.
Ethan McCarty 
>Hi Ethan,Intranets as a service: Can you clarify a bit more your thinking? Do you mean some kind of an extranet shared between companies, providing various collaboration/communication services?