Official corporate blogs are still rare, said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, largely because “corporate marketing and branding is often an exercise in hypercontrol of a message, and that doesn’t work well in a blogging context.” -from New York Times

Robert Scoble of Microsoft has put together a helpful guide to corporate blogging. Microsoft is a firm that has hundreds of bloggers on staff. These bloggers opinions are not official company doctrine, they are personal opinions. Yet, Microsoft encourages the activity by hosting many of these blogs and also by linking to them from company web pages. Scoble’s guide applies to this loose framework situation, but even more so to firm’s considering making a blog part of their marketing strategy.

As Palfrey suggests, very few corporate blogs exist at this point in time. I have but four listed in my Blogroll here. Please notify me if you know of others.