Bad Rap for Business Blogs: George Burns of the Chicago Tribune takes a look at corporate blogging (hat tip to Niall Cook at H&K) and comes away largely unimpressed. Burns makes a lot of good points about the pitfalls of corporate blogging—from too much corporate-speak to flogs to character blogs to blog payola, which I suppose was bound to happen eventually.

But if many of the individual points are valid, the overall tone is too negative. I think what Burns is seeing is the messy process of corporations figuring out how to do it right and in some cases straining with every nerve and fiber of their body to do it wrong. (They want all the benefits of blogging credibility, but without giving up control over the message.)

But there are companies that are getting it right—Burns alludes to Stonyfield Farms—and others will eventually learn from them.