Dave Gurteen hosted another Unicom seminar on social tools last week in central London, ably summarised by Ben Wild, IBM's Roo Reynolds and Paul Coyne from Emerald.

I spoke about Collective Intelligence and shared some case studies from our work, and I very much enjoyed exposing these ideas to some experienced knowledge consultants and practitioners.

For me, though, the highlight (NB: I missed day two) was Ian McNairn's presentation about what IBM are doing with social tools inside the organisation. Key points included:

• 26,000+ blogs inside IBM


• 20,000+ people blogging


• 2,300+ wiki spaces


• 100,000 people (c. 30% of the IBM population) have used these wikis


• High use of the IBM Dogear tool, and some interesting stories about how this is driving the dynamics of social networking within the company


• A mature evolution of public/private blogging boundaries within the firm, which is enabling people like Bob Sutor, Mary Beth Raven and Ed Brill to share information in the public realm in a useful way.

Ian gave an accomplished presentation, and I think we could learn a lot from what is going on inside IBM with social tools.