How does your organization share online media?

When you run across an interesting article/blog post/site on the Web, how do you share it within your organization?

How do you collaborate on this shared information?

How do you manage this shared information?

How do you manage this collaboration?

Email

Email is by far the most popular way to share information within an organization.  Some people will find an article and send the link as well as comments to select colleagues.  Some organizations have aliases set up that help syndicate this information appropriately (e.g. marketing@companyName.com)

But email is messy.

How do you manage a discussion among two or more people on shared information? Back and forth emails are terribly inefficient.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is largely non-Enterprise.  Del.icio.us is great for storing my bookmarks and sharing comments with a friend, but it's user-centric--it depends too much on the individual to be effective for groups. 

Diigo, Mento and Fleck are social bookmarking tools--feature loaded and fun--but they too are user centric.

Still, these aren't secure and definately not built for enterprise use.  Cogenz may be a solution for some--social bookmarking specifically for enterprise.  It's fast, secure and cheap!  ConnectBeam also applies successful "Web 2.0" themes for an enterprise solution for online media sharing.

JotSpot (and other make-your-own wiki providers)

Internal wikis are great for knowledge management.  They're familiar to most, fairly easy to use and simple to implement.  Trusted providers are also secure.  They can be built into a repository of knowledge, share documents and provide valuable information for internal use.  Services like these are group-centric--the collective effort of the organization builds this asset. 

But they're slow!  They're nearly static.  They take a lot of time and effort (relative to Social Bookmarking) just to contribute something.  Realistically, few would use a wiki to quickly share a link and a few comments. 

Microsoft SharePoint (and other sharing/collaboration platforms)

SharePoint does it all and more.  Users can build a huge knowledge base, collaborate on documents and share media.  SharePoint, like an internal wiki, is also group-centric.  More and more, platform collaboration services are adopting the successful elements of Web 2.0 (i.e. tagging, social networks, profiles, etc) and applying them to the enterprise--socalled "Enterprise 2.0".

SharePoint is great for medium to large organizations that can justify the expense, but small to medium-size organizations can't justify paying $80 per user + server expenses for SharePoint.  Moreso, small organizations would rarely take advantage of such feature-rich and powerful environments.  They need something simple, lightweight and ready now.

Conclusion

So what's needed for small to medium-size organizations for online media sharing?  Something small, lightweight and easy to use.  Something that allows for, faciliates and promotes sharing.  Something that is group-centric and manages collaboration.

I call this something Noozroom...and it's almost ready.