Lotus Touts Role of Blogs and Wikis (newsfactor.com)

"A lot of what we are doing now is figuring out where this all fits in. These things are not replacements for what we already have," says Duncan Mewherter, development manager for blogs, wikis and feeds at IBM Research. Instead, he describes them as a light layer of collaboration.

IBM/Lotus plans to expand its corporate collaboration tools by adding social relationship, behavior mapping and alerting technology that lets users easily share ideas, data, research and corporate knowledge.

Customers are hoping that the tools can help revolutionize the way their organizations communicate, share data, and analyze information and work patterns. The goal is to help improve collaboration.

At its annual Lotusphere conference, IBM/Lotus showed off plans to infuse its entire collaborative software lineup with social networking technology such as blogs, wikis and syndication feeds. While those tools are changing the face of the Internet, Lotus is adapting the concepts and features for internal corporate use in much the same way instant messaging was adapted for real-time communication.