TechWeb technology news site writer K.C. Jones is "watching the speed" (dated Grateful Dead reference) in which some highly rated Intranets have tweaked their sites for BlackBerry optimization.

Jones draws as reference usabilty gurus Nielsen Norman Group's just-released "Intranet Deisgn Annual 2006: The Year's Ten Best Intranets."

"Judges fund that many winners share common strategies," Jones writes, "such as mobile access with Intranets optimized for the BlackBerry, multimedia systems making use of video to increase productivity, and special brand names for Intranets."

U.S. winners include Capital One, IBM, Merrill Linch and Staples. Of the ten winners, two coincidentally happen to be telecom providers with BlackBerry offerings: U.K.s Vodafone and O2.

"O2 has a special mobile edition of its intranet that's optimized for the BlackBerry and strips the homepage down to a few of its most useful links," Jakob Nielsen writes in the report.