BusinessWeek’s influential Blogspotting website poses a question destined to reshape what remains of the dead tree media: “Why not publish every single letter to the editor?” Magazines and newspapers, which print just a few of the hundreds of the letters they receive each day, could instead place them all on-line. As the blogger explains, searchable, organized and interactive by readers, the letters would develop into “a very lively online forum of ideas.” Who could possibly object? Maybe this guy, who laments the mainstream media losing its monopoly on political discourse. Just a couple of days later, his employer, the Wall Street Journal, faced up to the new reality and touted its own blog, in the aptly named PBS blog, MediaShift.

Having pioneered the practice of bringing together links to the corporate blogosphere at the Business Blog Roundup, the NAM’s ShopFloor.org welcomes the news that Verizon Poliblog will soon set up its own corporate blogroll.

The most popular blogger at Sun Microsystems discusses the impact of the Internet on intellectual property rights, pointing out that those rights are protected at considerable cost to society. A Xerox blogger provides a glimpse of where things are heading by touting a new website for facilitating the exchange of creative ideas.

‘Tis the Season for exemplary customer service. At the Dell website, a helpful blogger informs customers about the best ways to contact the company for product support during the holiday gift-giving rush.

GE’s Global Research Blog reports on innovative research into bringing down the cost of fresh water by using wind turbines to power water desalinization plants. Here, Owens Corning blogs and brags about how its new composite material is advancing the burgeoning wind power industry in Brazil.

General Motors also does a bit of bragging at its FastLane blog, with a story about a man who has driven his GM car (a Saab, actually) over one million miles. FastLane regularly features stories, with nifty photos, about memorable GM cars and the people fortunate to own them.

Bragging — that seems to be the corporate blogosphere theme of the week. Boeing blogger Randy Baseler starts with “All I can say is, ‘Wow, it’s been an incredible year.’” Well, it turns out he can say more, and does, with 13 more paragraphs about the company’s many successes in 2006. His comments (okay, bragging) about the success of his blog should inspire other corporations to take that plunge into the blogosphere.

Picking up on a recent Washington Post article, EDS blogged about the Next Big Thing in technology, NASA’s plan for a moon base by 2024. Even more thrilling for EDS than the base itself would be all the spin-off technologies. The Manufacturing Institue’s Bill Canis blogged about an innovative way to facilitate the manufacturing of the moon base, a space elevator.

Back on Planet E, Stonyfield Farm, a U.S. organic food manufacturer recently acquired by France’s Groupe Danone, uses blogs to gather its customers into an on-line community and boost brand loyalty. The Bovine Bugle features regular commentary from an organic dairy farmer in Vermont, while at Baby Babble new mothers can read about health and environmental issues.

The General Motors Fast Lane blog celebrates the fact that Buicks are one of the best-selling auto brands in China, especially among “the young and hip in Shanghai.”

Shaping the public debate about an issue is a major activity in the corporate blogosphere. A senior executive at Indium Corporation blogged recently about the European Community directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), which makes manufacturers responsible for collecting and recycling computers and related equipment. The business of WEEE recycling, he observes, has profit potential, citing large WEEE disassembly facility which opened in Hungary last month.

Perhaps in response, Dell blogged that despite its pro-recycling corporate ethic, the company opposes “Advanced Recovery Fees,” an option being debated by federal and state lawmakers in the U.S. Too bureaucratic and inefficient, says Dell.

At the Trivergence blog, an Accenture executive comments regularly about “the interplay of Devices, Data, and Controls in a networked world.” In his latest entry, he describes how Services Oriented Architecture will create new business opportunities, not just for telecoms but software companies as well.

The best blogs are real blogs. Unlike some corporate webpages crafted by public relations departments, real blogs are informal commentaries written in the first-person, by a real person. And, the best of the corporate blogosphere keep the focus on a specific goal.

Owens Corning reaches out to its customers with The Pink Panther Energy Blog. “Keeping a paw on the pulse of energy conversation,” this blog answers e-mailed questions about saving energy and has links to information about Owens Corning. Eastman Kodak’s A Thousand Words blog, which presents stunning photos and commentary, is a “place for stories from the people of Kodak. We invite you to join our conversation with stories of your own.”

In yesterday’s Digital Straight Talk blog, Comcast seeks to improve its corporate image with a response to a USA Today story critical of the cable industry. Boeing’s vice president of marketing blogged on Friday about the economic and environmental benefits from deregulating the commercial aviation industry. General Electric touts its advances in energy technology with the GE Global Research blog. In the most recent post, a manager discusses his proposals for wind power generation presented at GE’s Future of Energy Technology Summit.

At My Cup of Cha, ING’s Asia/Pacific head of e-business blogs about a Hong Kong-based project to set up a global auction website for their 120,000 employees in the region. Highly significant for the future of corporate blogging is that such an enormous world-wide financial institution as ING made one of its first blog forays in China.

The Internet is big business in China. The number of users is expected to double over the next four years, to more than 250 million. There are already 60 million bloggers in China, and that total should reach 100 million by the end of next year. Chinese is now the third most popular language in the blogosphere, after English and Japanese. Having outmuscled Yahoo and Google in its domestic market, the leading Chinese search engine, Baidu, now has the fourth-highest traffic for any website on Earth. In July, Baidu successfully launched its own blogging platform, Baidu Space. Chinese corporate blogging cannot be far away.

The NAM will be blogging every week about what’s what in the blogs of U.S. manufacturers and other corporations. It’s a big blogosphere out there and it’s going to get a lot bigger, so contact Michael Zak, mzak@nam.org with blog news you’d like covered here at ShopFloor.org.

Today we begin a new feature here that we plan to run weekly, although frequency will likely increase as business blog content increases. As you might know, many businesses — and specifically, many of our members — have started blogs. Some have been hugely successful while others are still in the early stages.

Our own Michael Zak is busy checking out these blogs and will do a weekly roundup of what’s going on around the various manufacturers’ blogs out there. His first installment is below.

Blogs have become a serious, integral part of the business world. More than a hundred corporations already have blogs, and many more plan to enter the corporate blogosphere in 2007.

The Securities and Exchange Commission gave its seal of approval a few weeks ago when its chairman, Christopher Cox, posted a comment on the Sun Microsystems blog. Though not yet green-lighting use of the Internet to disseminate material information, Mr. Cox signaled that the SEC is favorably inclined, writing: “The Commission encourages the use of websites as a source of information to the market and investors.”

Corporations are discovering blogs to be a low-cost and effective means of promoting their communications and marketing goals. A Harvard Business School newsletter summarized things nicely: “It’s time to think of the blog as your friend. Skillful blogging can boost your company’s credibility and help it connect with customers.”

As could be expected for the Internet, first to blog in corporate America were technology companies. This greeting — “Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.” — sets the tone for the hundreds of bloggers at Sun Microsystems. Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO, is a corporate blogging pioneer. In his November 13th post, he touts the advantages of open source software. Some 24, 000 IBM employees blog on the company’s internal platform, in addition to the dozens of bloggers on the corporate website. While most technology blogs impart information about new products, Big Blue Bloggers also show a deft touch for comedy with three videos posted to YouTube. Other blogging technology companies include Microsoft and Intel.

Corporations find a variety of reasons to blog. One of the most important is to influence the company’s public image, unfiltered by the media. Responding to the many blogs commenting about General Motors, the company set up its own blog. GM’s vice chairman, Bob Lutz, is among the leaders of the corporate blogging pack. Recently, he blogged about accepting a State Department award for social responsibility in Colombia, an achievement which NAM also heralded.

A popular blog by Boeing’s vice president of marketing, Randy Baseler, communicates directly with the people who fly in Boeing aircraft. In his November 22 posting, he favorably compares the 777 and 787 with the Airbus A350. Baseler certainly deserves some of the credit for recent decisions by Korean Airlines and Fedex to cancel their orders for the A350 and buy Boeing instead. USA! USA!

The latest post to Xerox’s Big I, Little T Blog describes how the company is in the prototype stage with “transient documents,” copier paper that can be re-used many times. There is also a link to a New York Times article about this important environmentally conscious new technology.

Another reason companies blog is to humanize their corporate image and advertise their products. DuPont’s innovative website, Real Families, Real Fun, is a good example of this. Updated daily by a mother chitchatting about her family, the blog Citizen Mom’s Family Journal draws readers to website links promoting the DuPont corporation and its products. Hallmark uses a similar marketing approach with a blog about food and another about books.

Establishing a dialogue with their customers is the purpose of many corporate blogs. For example, in addition to Verizon’s Poliblog for discussions about telecommunications, the company plans to create another blog for feedback from customers. Responding to posts to this new blog will be a 24-hour response team. According to Jerri DeVard, senior vice president of marketing and brand management, Verizon will spend at least 15 percent of its marketing budget on-line.

The NAM will be blogging every week about what’s what in the blogs of American manufacturers and other corporations. It’s a big blogosphere out there and it’s going to get a lot bigger, so contact Michael Zak, mzak@nam.org, with blog news you’d like covered here at ShopFloor.org.