The response to my recent postings about corporate blogging has been astounding: thousands upon thousands of people have emailed me, with questions and comments and expressions of gratitude and disgust. Warring factions throughout the Middle East have declared an indefinite truce, so they can talk about the issues. Congress has declared a series of national holidays from now through the end of the year. The remainder of the NBA basketball season has been cancelled, Nelly Furtado has recorded a new hip-hop song about corporate blogging, and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have agree to play the starring roles in the upcoming movie, Ed Yourdon Blogs About Blogging.

Well, actually, one person sent me an e-mail … but, hey, it’s better than nothing. And that person’s message was a good one: “stop talking about all of this blogging stuff from an abstract, philosophical perspective, and show us some real blogging policies!”

Ugh. That sounds like real work. And anyway, I don’t know if it would serve any useful purpose to create my idea of the “ideal” corporate blogging policy. Instead, why not show you some real ones? You can take a look and see what you think. You can pick and choose the parts that make sense for your company, and discard the rest.

Without further ado, here are five concrete, real-world blogging policies:

• IBM’s blogging policy, published in mid-May 2005. What’s interesting about this policy is not just that it was not just developed by members of the corporate communications and legal teams, but that it evolved over a period of ten days, as a collaborative effort on an inhouse wiki.
• Sun Microsysystems’ blogging policy — ummm, not immediately obvious when this was published, but I suspect you can track it down fairly easily (I’m writing this on a 6-hour plane flight, with no Internet access). I like this one because it consists of ten simple, straightforward, no-nonsense guidelines.
• Yahoo Employee Blog Guidelines — this page contains a link to a downloadable PDF file with the actual guidelines, along with some breezy, chatty commentary and “guidelines about the guidelines” from a handful of Yahoo! bloggers.
• Groove’s blogging guidelines, as discussed by Ray Ozzie, who is now Microsoft’s Chief Scientist. One of the interesting issues raised in this set of guidelines is the need for all employees in a company to suspend blogging during SEC-mandated “quiet period,” such as the period immediately before an IPO.
• Charlene Li’s sample blogging policy, from Forrester Research — written in 2004, this is not a “real” policy, but merely a short bullet-list of half a dozen guidelines to keep in mind. If you’re not ready to drag the legal department, the corporate communications department, and the HR department into a series of committee meetings about your company’s blogging policy, this might be a reasonable place to start.

One of the interesting things about these examples is that, like so many other things, they’re out there on the Web. I don’t have any secret spies or contacts within IBM, Sun, Yahoo, or Groove who fed this information to me; I simply Googled “corporate blogging policy” and poked around for a few minutes to see which ones looked interesting and relevant. And that means there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of other examples out there, including companies of roughly the same size, and in roughly the same industry as yours. So if people in your company are saying, “Well, I wonder what our biggest competitor, XYZ Corp, has as a blogging policy,” you might well be able to find it and use it as a starting point for your own.

Happy hunting…