Does anyone have an internal work blog/social networking area?

[The Stig]

I'm trying to lift my internal team (but not the whole company as they already have their own blog/social networking system on a corporate level, but they're far too serious/formal for fun stuff) to improve on how we communicate/share info/have a bit of fun.

Going with a simple solution, I described how we can build a quick news portal (essentially, a blog) for internal news/stories only for us as a whole (40~ of us, but scattered across the office). However, I am wondering how far this will work. As far as I can see, people are quite backwards here. This is not something I want to completely change, as it's not too possible unless I create a good bandwagon for it, but as of now we have no offical line of information outside of sending everyone 10mb mails when something amazing happens, or when the big boss needs to address everyone.

What I am wondering is if anyone here works in an office with such a system and how successful that is? I have a friend at HP full of graduate students and from what I understand their forum is thriving with activity, unlike the bigger diverse of people here who never caught the "Web 2.0" boat and are trailing behind.

I'm not aiming for an internal Facebook (yet), just something fairly basic. Currently our "monthly" newsletters are distributed via e-mail and I figured this would be an excellent time to migrate to a website/link style e-mail/alert and get everyone to read that and hopefully click around.

[Caiyuo]

If sharing information and having a resource for you and your co-workers to reference is the priority you could try something like a workplace wiki: http://lifehacker.com/5636982/stop-r...workplace-wiki - Maybe not what you're looking for but I thought I'd throw it out there. Doesn't really provide any form of socialization that I know of.

[Killgannon]

I am speaking on an enterprise level, but you could easily find something similar for free I'm sure (some CMS's come to mind actually), at the place I work we have a company wide MS SharePoint site we call LillyNet. We recently updated it to 2010, which added plenty of social networking features (associates, tagging, status updates, etc) it also offers sites for personal users/blogs (mysites) and you can even make larger collab sites for groups of people to have blogs/wikis/files/forums/etc thing is, from what I've seen in supporting it and shit, people don't really use the social features at all because they're "new" and mostly unnecessary at an established business level of older people... if your area is mainly older people, they are less likely to adopt new social networking things, vs grad students who tend to be younger

[Yabby]

Could never do this where i work. We had to block all networking sites because people would spend hours of their workday on that shit.

[Olo401]

My boss is attempting to set up a workplace blog right now. The deal is he wants us all to post on it regularly to update our work status. He tried something similar before this - having us email him a daily rundown of what we did - but it eventually was pushed to the side because we just got too busy to do it. I expect the blog idea to fail in a similar way. If he wants to check up on our daily progress and workload, he can just walk down to our desks and ask. And as far as internal group communication goes I personally think it'd be more efficient to have an instant messaging setup.