a clear yes and no  
If you have hosted blog solution google and co will not count the content as something that belongs to your website. YET! the content you submit there will be ranked higher because the blogs you write on will usually have a kick a** pagerank which – if you place links back to your website – you/your website will benefit from. 
That being said: using a blog inside your website is interesting also. Reason being, that you provide your thoughts and insights on your corporate ID, etc. NOTE:! If you pull your feed into your website do not do it with frames because SEs will not index the content properly. Instead, use script to import the RSS feed, reformat it to fit your websites layout and then have it displayed there. 

actually, blogging is 2.0 – so there is no real more growth to the whole issue. 
Yet, if you’re referring to the direction blogging is going to take, then I would say that we’re going to move more and more towards blogging becoming something exceptionally social with a lot of content contributors on few niche platforms, which will then become pretty famous. 
But unfortunatly, my glass ball is broken, so these were just my 2 cents  

quite a deep question. To answer the first part of it: yes, social media is definitly important for F500 corps. Why? Because there are a lot of people on the social media platforms and the continue to grow. And while the social media platforms remain free (if you really only use the standard functions) every lead you pick up is free also. Like Zero bucks. 
Since a lot of companies are moving towards things like reputation retention/frontline customer care strategies, this person who spends the whole day on the web, could easily be involved in other online communities shoving out content, etc. 
One of the simplest things that come to my mind is to synch up your blog on several social profiles and thus automatically publish posts to the according websites. 
The second part: I am pretty much present everywhere. And has it helped me? Yes, it definitly has. I comment pretty frequently and participate in a lot of discussions, blog a lot of articles associated to my business but also about my private life. 

no, I don’t. A lot of enterprises don’t see the value of mass collaboration and which benefits it brings along. And if they do, they deploy a platform but do not encourage their employees to use it adequatly. 
Now, I know that the hardest task in implementing an E 2.0 solution inside an organization is to get the people to contribute but there are simple measures I have worked out to do so. And the whole organization profits from these because of the high amount of information flow taking place. 

the time you took to ask this question has cost you $100. A domain costs a few cents a month  
But seriously – the best way to go is to have an appealing name that is not too far from the original message you are trying to convey. 
In the two domains you have pointed out I would go ahead and use both of ‘em. You could run into copyright issues with “Enigma” because I’m willing to bet my three newest pairs of boxers that someone on this mother earth holds the rights for the name with all associated credentials to it. Please also considder that and do some research on it. 
The bottom line being: the shorter and more meaningful for the product and the easier to associate and remember, the better. 

actually I believe so. Yet you have to find out whether there are tools out there that are – in general – even more beneficial, like a Wiki for instance. A blog could definitly be interesting also, that I must admit. 
I recently heard about a programming session a few devs were having. The core was seated in one room and the rest was decentralized across the globe. The means they used to communicate were a software which allowed the synchro altering of the code and they were all connected over an IRC channel which they used to communicate in non-code… That might be referred to as real time mass collaboration I guess  
Yet I would almost go ahead and use an integrated blog/timestamp tool in another solution – something customized. Because a blog is cool approach, but a bit of a broad sword because you need one or more features here (which a blog may not bring along) and can neglect some other tools which the blog-sw brings along but only costs server load, disk space or whatever.

Most of the times it happens through a wide spread campaign with a lot of variables. 
Starting from figuring out which demographics and localities you’re facing and – upon figuring that out – developing a marketing plan, the press release and who to send it to, etc. 
Along with that may go an initial publicity campaign in the social media world, getting you attention from that specific group of people you are facing. 

The importance lies in the determination of the visitors perception of the project and how – and into which direction – the network or etailing site needs to develop if a certain site/section or piece of content is percieved as uninteresting or even neglected. 
The problem the personal profiling though. While the social networks have a pretty easy time because they hold tons of information about a person etc., the etailing platforms can only rely upon the information given by the customer in the past. And let’s be honest: while we spend hours and hours detailing our profile on social networking platforms we get sceptical when a commercial platform asks us for a our date of birth or associated, “intimate” information. 
The metrics used are a combination of those in every above standard web analytics software plus the data a platform holds about it’s users. 
Hope I was able to help and feel free to call me if you need any more information.

It is premature to say that it would cost a buffalo nickel or a fortune because there are too many dependencies involved. 
Some of them will include:
Whether or not the platform can be open source which will determine a tremendous amount of the projects costs. 
Is there really a need for a content management system involved at all or is the content static? Minor changes can be done to a website for a rediculous amount of money and if this specific company has a change every half a year and the implementation of an enterprise level CMS (regardless if open source or not) can really lead to some sleepless nights. 
You probably get my point. You really have to work down a pretty individual catalogue before you even go to stage two of the project. 
If you need my help please feel free to call me.

There are about 10 kazillion dependencies. Things you have to consider in that context are: 
1. HOW LOAD INTENSIVE IS THE BLOG; meaning how many images are involved in every post and how long is it going to take a modem user (yes, we still have them out there so don’t forget) to load the site completely if there are more then 10 posts on the homepage
2. WHAT FREQUECY does the blog receive new posts in? Which is necssary to determine because some people wanting to share a specific post (and are inexperience blog users) will not send the dedicated link to that specific post but to the blog its self. Now, if you publish 10 articles daily, the friend who received the recommendation email and reads it a day later because he’s a bit lazy on email too, will not find that article but the 10 new ones that have been published since the email was sent to him. 
And those are just two of them. But the most important ones. 
You’ll have probably set up a few blogs in your life. And software packages like WordPress draw from a long time of experience. So if their standard settings is 10, I’d say it all boils down to that, I suppose. 
If you need more help please feel free to contact me.