WhatCounts, the email delivery application service provider, has announced BlogUnit, a network appliance for enterprise weblogging. The product is a rack-mountable appliance that plugs into a company network and runs the vendor's weblog publishing software.

It's hard to believe that a new type of product would emerge in this market where there are already quite a few vendors with established weblog products, services and client bases. The BlogUnit offering is actually quite different, however, and makes good sense for a number of reasons. Like the Google Search Appliance, the BlogUnit appliance is targetted at the corporate market, where the idea of quickly plugging in and setting up a pre-installed enterprise service might be attractive. The BlogUnit product also looks interesting for this market because of the features they're providing to help companies control publishing workflow and distribution. One of the examples given, is that the product allows the set up of controls to automatically alert certain individuals to approve posts as they're entered into the system. This is particularly necessary for companies that are concerned about what the company communicates to the outside world. Those companies can include corporate communications and legal counsel as gateways in the publishing workflow. It seems like a very small thing -- something that's built into most major content management systems. But this type of workflow management is probably a very important feature for many companies.

I can hear all the blog evangelists starting to get uneasy about all of this. The more steps to filter communication, the less blog-like these sites become. But while companies may be feeling the need to react to competitors who are using weblogs as a medium for communication, they may also need to address legal and corporate communications concerns. For those companies, workflow gateways are probably necessary. With every additional filter in the process, however, complexity is added and the simplicty of weblogging starts to get lost.

Imagine starting a weblog initiative with even 2 or 3 individual bloggers. Now imagine that every entry they post has to be reviewed and approved before it goes live. Not only does that sort of editing and review make it difficult for the bloggers to feel like they are trusted and in control, but it also demands a pretty big committment of the PR and legal people whose job it will be to review every entry.

I think the corporate concerns about weblogs are very real. But these concerns and how they may potentially impact the process of weblogging make it more and more difficult for a weblog to succeed. By its very nature, weblogging is personal and organic. Adding unncessary filters to address corporate concerns will make blogging feel much more organizational and synthetic and I would argue, may potentially make weblogs not very different from any other messages published by PR and marketing.

A the end of the day, the nature of the company and its culture and politics will determine how well a company will take to public blogging. Public weblogs won't be as successful in large corporations unless bloggers feel trusted and empowered to represent their company. For bloggers to feel this way, executives need to trust them and demonstrate that trust. They need to trust that their employees will follow the policies they set. If this dynamic exists between management and employees, all that is needed is to set the policies about what can be discussed on blogs and establish an ongoing dialog between the policy setters and potential bloggers about legal and communications concerns.

I'm really not as interested in customer-facing corporate blogs as much as I am in blogging on the intranet. But this product and some recent conversations I've had about corporate blogging with journalists and with customers inside my company have made me more aware of some of the very different issues that face companies when they blog to the outside world. Fortunately, intranet blogging for knowledge and project management doesn't hold as many obstacles.