IBM revealed it has plans to add two new corporate blogging tools to the forthcoming Version 2.5 of its Workplace collaboration platform and Workplace Designer development tools.

Version 2.5 of Workplace will ship with a Weblog component that allows users to create blogs with features such as archiving, comments, search, and syndication.

There will be a single point of administration for blogs and other Workplace components. Another feature, dubbed blogroll, allows bloggers to show a public list of favorite internal and external Weblogs, IBM officials said.

In addition, the Workplace 2.5 blogging tool will offer both an Atom and an RSS syndication feed format so that readers can subscribe to their favorite blogs in their feed reader of choice.

IBM envisions intranet communications as the main application for its blogging tools. According to IBM officials, the compelling thing is that they are building these tools into the collaboration platform itself instead of being add-on tools or third party tools.

The tools are being designed in the context that the majority of IBMers who blog do so on the intranet, to share information amongst themselves.

Internally at IBM there are about 2,800 blogs that function mostly as an aid for team members when problem solving, IBM officials said.

The main benefit to incorporating blogs into business communications, both internal- and external-facing, is that blogs can become part of the corporate memory, according to officials.

Blogs can be easily exposed to others in somewhat of a directory tree structure, through full text search, or passed around via permalinks, they said.

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino already offer blogging and blog reading tools.