Part of my job at the World Bank is to help the institution engage in new media. I often speak about what social media is, why it is important etc...
The one thing I ask people to do even before considering whether they should blog or not is to listen. To spend a good chunk of time finding and listening what is being discussed online.

As I joined the Corporate Communications department, i thought that the best way to help people understand how rich this new web is was simply to show it. Right around this time, we were playing with Drupal, a solid, open-source content and community platform for different intranet pilots. I decided to spec out an aggregator that would help people understand, follow and collaborate around mentions of the organization online. Management okay-ed it - thanks Nicole - and off we went.

I wrote the basic concept and high level requirements and the World Bank sponsored the development of the software. Ian, Eric and Alex at Development Seed wrote the code and developped a very nice UI. WRI also pitched in with a terrific set of features and here we are 6 months later with a very nice open source product.

How it works - in a nutshell
You plug in a number of rss feeds (ranging from your favorite blogs to watchlists), it periodically downloads them and parses the items. All the items are then dedupped, tagged (integration with the Yahoo! terms api), ranked on alexa and technorati. They are then republished on a digg-like interface along with tagclouds, basic dynamic graphing, commenting, bookmarking and ajax.

There are some quirks, a bit of noise (garbage in - garbage out) and it could definitely have more features (i think of a new one everyday) but I find it to be a very useful tool for tracking across blogs, podcasts, videos, photos etc...

What next?
I suggest you go read Eric's post on it. He gives more technical details and points to some of the already released code. Then, install it and take it for a drive. If your organization is interested, why not help develop it further?