Fast Company has yet another blogging article, which nonetheless contains some interesting information about blogs in the corporate sector:

Dynamite, indeed. The burgeoning blog world--1.6 million keyboard tappers at last count--is making big inroads into corporate culture. From tech companies like Microsoft (which says it "respects and supports" blogs like Scoble's) and IBM to decidedly nontech outfits like Dr. Pepper, companies are starting to use blogging both as a medium to market products and monitor brands and as an internal knowledge-management tool. To meet corporate demand, both UserLand and Six Apart, makers of popular blog software programs, are coming out with enterprise-level products later this year.

However, one of the issues for corporations and other organizations is the same thing that provides weblogs' greatest strength--the voice of the weblog poster comes through. This creates trust and builds reader loyalty, but it also makes people used to promoting a shiny polished message uneasy:

But that informal transparency is precisely why many companies' embrace of blogs is at best uneasy. Internally, blogs have the potential to let employees who wouldn't otherwise be seen as authorities have a voice with a lot of impact. "[Companies] are not going to be able to stuff it back into the box," says Greg Lloyd, CEO of Traction, a business-oriented blog software company. Externally, the fears are even greater. Letting employees speak directly to customers requires a huge amount of trust. A loose cannon might reveal corporate secrets, give out the wrong message, or even open up the company to legal trouble.

...via elearningpost