A few people (mostly lawyer-bloggers, for reasons I don’t understand) noticed a recent blog-note that I wrote about corporate blogging policies; see, for example, here and here for examples of the commentaries from these nice folks. And a reader responded to one of those commentaries by alerting us to a list of corporate blogging policies on the NewPR/Wiki blogsite, including that of General Motors and Harvard Law School and a few others.

The list of a “few others” overlapped some that I had decided to track down on my own, simply because I thought they would be interesting. Here they are:

• Microsoft’s blogging policy
• Apple’s lack of a blogging policy, as explained by a former Apple employee named Chuq Von Rospach.
• Dell’s blogging policy
• Google … apparently doesn’t have a public blogging policy, but there’s a hilarious fake policy that’s bound to create a chuckle or two (one of the “forbidden [blog] titles” that amused me was “Y2K Revisited: Did it really do nothing?”)

It then occurred to me that perhaps not everyone is as interested as me in the blogging policies of high-tech computer companies. So I tracked down Fortune magazine’s list of the 100 best companies to work for in 2006, and tried to see what policies I could find among the top-ten companies (the other 90 companies are left as an exercise for the reader). Interestingly, the answer was: nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. No policies for Genentech, Wegmans Food Markets, Valero Energy, Griffin Hospital, W.L. Gore (not Al Gore’s company, but the Goretex company), Container Store, Vision Service Plan, J.M. Smucker, Recreational Equipment, or S.C. Johnson. Lots of people — customers, visitors, and random other people with an opinion they want to share with the world — are blogging about these companies; but if the employees are doing any blogging of their own, the policies that guide their actions are either private, or non-existent.

I did find one interesting commentary about Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) in Roland Piquepaille’s Blogs for Companies blog, on a page titled “Archive for the ‘Blogging Policies’ Category“: on August 31, 2005 he wrote a commentary on an article that had appeared a month earlier, in the July 25, 2005 issue of the Puget Sound Business Journal. The article, entitled “REI managers venture into the land of blogs,” indicated that REI was planning to have its 78 store managers begin blogging about various things. But the article says that REI’s email manager “is still mulling whether it will open its company blogospher up for customer comments,” and apparently non-managerial REI employees won’t be given any blogging capability. Of course, all of this was written a year ago; and things may have changed since then. But as of now, I couldn’t find a publicly-available REI blogging policy on the Internet.

Not that that’s necessarily a good thing, or a bad thing. Indeed, I suppose I shouldn’t be too upset if none of the top-100 companies have a public blogging policy … well, Microsoft occupies position #42 on the list, and Yahoo is #73 — so we know there’s at least two representative entries on the list.