The four Intranetizens like to read widely on anything to do with intranets – content, strategy, design, technology, and much else besides.

Here’s a round-up of what’s caught our eye this week.

Are you tired of ‘thinking outside the box’? Well we are too, and according to a recent survey, so are your intranet’s users. In a recent poll, employees admitted to being baffled by workplace jargon ten times a day on average.

In this special pre-conference post, the Intranetizens explain why jargon should be both avoided and embraced, and invite you to test their commitment to clear communication.

As the use of social tools in the enterprise has exploded over recent years, the role of community management is being talked about more and more. Yet confusion remains about exactly what it is, and whether it’s really needed. Social media purists argue authentic online communities should be as completely self-organised and un-managed as possible. Others take a more pragmatic approach, suggesting effective facilitation and management helps the community to develop so that it meets its intended purpose.

In this special guest post for Intranetizen, Sam Woods, Community Manager for a global financial company’s social intranet sets out what makes community management work.

The four Intranetizens like to read articles, books and blog posts on a variety of topics. For your delight — and failing that, an aide to your continued procrastination — here are a few articles that caught our eye this week.

Gamification – applying game design thinking to non-game applications – has certainly been the buzzword of 2012, with some analysts predicting that by 2013 half of all business initiatives will have gamified processes. But the response from digital workplace specialists has been more muted, with many of our blog commenters finding real-life implentations underwhelming at best.

As the Enterprise Gamification Forum kicks off this week over in San Diego, we’re taking a closer look at gamification and asking if it really has a place on your intranet.