When I arrived at Six Apart’s office a couple days ago for a meeting with its Chief Evangelist, Anil Dash (whose blog is here), I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. A sales pitch on why its Moveable Type blogging product is better than competitors like WordPress? Nope. An explanation of the differences between its Moveable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox products? Nope. A philosophical discussion of why people need blogs to satisfy their need for creative expression? Nope, not really.

Instead, Anil articulated a theme that I had heard from two or three other Web 2.0 companies in my travels through Silicon Valley this past week: email is broken. On a personal level, Anil says, email is intrusive, demanding the attention of its recipient. And on a group level, it’s ephemeral; after a group email message is disseminated to its intended recipients, it disappears into everyone’s overflowing, disorganized email archives.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with the notion of email being intrusive; after all, it’s a far less intrusive form of communication than the telephone (as an aside, Anil mentioned that hardly anyone in Six Apart’s office uses the phone to communicate with one another). Instant messaging (IM) can certainly be intrusive, though one can block or disable IM when intrusions are unacceptable. But regardless of how I view email communications in my own little world, I was intrigued that lots of other people — especially in the world of business organizations, which Anil focused on throughout our discussion — view blogs as a non-interruptive form of communication, and as a place to “park” email messages.

As for the notion of email communication being ephemeral in nature, I was intrigued with Anil’s suggestion that a major benefit of blogs is that it provides persistence to group communications, by preserving valuable information over time. Furthermore, blogs facilitate collaboration and feedback — assuming that people want to collaborate and provide feedback. And that may be an important distinction between personal blogs and business blogs; I suspect that a number of organizations have dismissed blogging as frivolous because of their impression of the personal blogs that threaten to overwhelm the planet. Of the 50 million blogs counted by Technorati as of July 31, 2006 (with 175,000 new blogs being added each day!), I suspect that 49.9 million belong to lonely people who have nothing worthwhile to say, whose postings are read by nobody but themselves, and thus to whom nobody else provides any comments or feedback.

And while that could theoretically be true of business blogs too — e.g., XYZ Corp might have a lonely, anonymous blogger publishing his pet peeves and complaints on a blog that nobody else bothers reading — it’s far more likely that business blogs will either be aimed at groups of people working together on a common project, or aimed at the external marketplace of customers, prospects, suppliers, and business partners. For example, General Motors’ Vice-Chairman, Bob Lutz, publishes his own blog called FastLane Blog; I looked at the postings during the month of August, and found that each one of them had approximately three dozen comments. And the blog-tracking service Technorati reports that FastLaneBlog is ranked the 2,445th-most popular blog out of 50 million on the planet — so, yes, they do generate feedback and collaboration.

I don’t drive a GM car, so it would not have occurred to me to look for, or subscribe to, Bob Lutz’s blog. But Anil mentioned it to me specifically, to emphasize a trend that he believes is becoming more common in big companies: senior executives writing their own blog to provide a personal “voice” that the marketplace can listen to. I too have a gut feeling that this is happening, but we shouldn’t get too carried away: impressive as the Lutz example may be, a quick Google search indicates that neither the CEO of Ford, Chrysler, nor Toyota have a blog of their own. Similarly, it appears that neither Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, nor Steve Jobs of Apple, nor Sam Palmisano of IBM, nor Larry Ellison of Oracle, nor Eric Schmidt of Google, have their own blogs. But Sun Microsystems’ CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has a blog here; so maybe there’s hope for the future.

But if the CEO isn’t blogging, lots of other people in the organization are. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer may be too busy (or lazy or paranoid or inarticulate or whatever) to write their own blogs, but the Microsoft Watch website claims that there are over 2,000 current and former Microsoft employees with blogs; and a June 11, 2006 posting on Microsoft Monitor Weblog claims that there are over 3,000 Microsofty bloggers. For the corporate CEO’s (or HR departments) that worry this might get out of hand, and that they should have a strict policy about employee blogs (e.g., requiring that all blog postings be approved before publishing, or that only managers be allowed to blog), Anil had a very simple piece of advice: what such companies really need is a communications policy, not just a blogging policy. After all, employees can blog from home, publicly or anonymously; they can upload their embarrassing photos to Flickr, and their perverse personal thoughts to MySpace and a dozen other social networks. They can send “whistleblower” email to every newspaper in the land, and they can upload vitriolic videos onto YouTube.

Whether it’s a blog, or an email, or an uploaded video, I think companies are certainly justified in taking aggressive steps against libelous statements, disclosure of proprietary information, and a variety of other inappropriate behaviors. But if they go too far beyond this, and instill an atmosphere of fear and censorship among their employees, it’s only a matter of time before some employee finds the opportunity to disclose some embarrassing information in a very public way. Banning corporate blogs isn’t going to change that fact of life.

Still, blogging is not always welcomed in today’s medium- and large-sized companies; Anil says Six Apart’s blogging tools often creep into companies through “skunk works” initiatives outside the IT department. When IT does become aware of blogging activities going on within various business departments, they try — at the very least — to ensure that the blogging tolls support such enterprise-level mechanisms as LDAP, security, backup, and privacy. And they may ask for functionality beyond the ability to post and share text-oriented material — e.g., the ability to handle calendar and spreadsheet documents, workflow capability, etc.

Enterprise-level capabilities of this kind are contained in Six Apart’s Moveable Type product, which is typically installed behind the corporate firewall; blogging for the professional individual seems best handled by the company’s hosted TypePad product; and personal/social blogging is supported by the company’s LiveJournal and Vox products. There seems to be some overlap between the products, and I’m a little confused about which product is best suited for which kind of blogger; but I’m not here to sell Six Apart’s products, or even necessarily endorse them over alternative products like WordPress (which I use for this blog) or Blogger. They’ve all got their advantages and disadvantages, and I’ll let you decide for yourself which one is best for your own situation.

What’s most important to me is that companies like Six Apart are demonstrating that they’re not only survivors, but that they’ve gained enough maturity to work effectively with the Fortune 1000 companies that are beginning to implement blogs on a large scale. Six Apart will be celebrating its fifth anniversary in October; that’s an eternity in today’s high-tech world. The company may be tiny by IBM or Google standards, but they’ve got what I consider to be a critical mass of employees, products, technology, funding, and experience. If blogging does survive and flourish in the enterprise environment, it will largely be because of the efforts of veteran vendors like Six Apart.