DISCLOSURE: After Herb Caen died and the Hearst family took over the San Francisco Chronicle, I stopped reading the local paper. The New York Times arrives every morning, Sundays included, and I find it the best newspaper I've ever read.

The Annotated New York Times is the blogosphere's response to what appears in the Times, "tracking 24,468 articles, 1,692 topics and 4,457 New York Times authors."

An outfit called Blog Runner is behind the Annotated NYT and similar activities that seek to unite articles with commentary about them to form "conversations" about current topics. As they say, "Each minute, over 3,000 blog messages are injected into the Internet.
Overwhelmed? BlogRunner tracks breaking news stories and blog conversations as they propagate across the web."

So? Imagine having something like this in-house, on your intranet. Self-policing. Cheap. Certainly worth exploring.