Intranet News

I read this post from Paul Miller on Intranet Life with interest. Paul suggests that the amount of page real estate on intranets devoted to 'news' will decline in 2008/9. I think Paul is probably right, although not for the reasons he suggests. You can see my comments on the site, so I'm not going to repeat all of them here.

However, I do also think that we'll start to see news treated, not as some kind of separate entity, but as content that can be mixed in with other content. For example, the online services Paul suggests are going to replace news will themselves begin to host news and other messages from the organisation. Likewise, the social networks being built inside organisations will also mix in news with the user generated content, in much the way Facebook has been mixing in adverts to my news feed. This is all just an other example of the blurring that is going on. Blurring between home and work. Private and business. Official and unofficial. One geography and another. One platform or another. News and opinion.

I also think people will consume far more via RSS and their news readers than by going to the sites themselves. We're already seeing a huge growth in RSS news content inside the organisation I work for. And that's another reason why news will need to find its way to other platforms.

And in this new boundary-less world, we'll make sense of it all by trusting the content from those with the highest reputation, not those who wear the official badge.