I think it is absolutely true that a corporation is better of with comments-open weblogs running. Conversation is always good, and the naysayers who say that you never know what negative stuff will get said or what loons will abuse the comment system clearly haven't been paying attention to the worldwide mass experiment in voluntary collaboration that is building e.g. Wikipedia.
But I still have doubts about the consequences for the corporate bloggers of actually blogging for their corporation. To keep it short, I believe that people's distrust of corporation will rub off in a distrust of the corporate blogger. I know it's my personal instinct to think so. People accept roles in corporations and do things they wouldn't do if they weren't there. That's all fine and dandy when I am able to recognize that they're in that role. I think corporate blogging blurs that.
I think I'm also repeating myself. You might want to follow the discussion attached to this post.
The Lego logo of yours - is it a corporate blogging statement?
Posted by: m on October 24, 2004 1:29 PMCorporate blogging is only meaningful if it means: "Is it OK if we aggregate
your weblog's RSS-feed on www.corporation.com?"
I think there's at least two ways: "Role blogging", where you blog as an employee of corporation.com also works as long as you keep any kind of PR spin out of it. For the blogger I think it is much better, really. But obviously it makes for an easy excuse to say something you don't really mean if everyone knows you're doing it for a little while.
I think a lot of the Microsoft blogs are "role blogs" not really personal blogs.
It's still a lot better to get that corporate information unfiltered by marketing. The MS Visual Studio developer guy will have more to say to me about development than the MS Visual Studio marketing guy.