Nearly ten percent of companies have fired an employee for violating corporate blogging or message board policies, and 19 percent have disciplined an employee for the same infractions, according to a new survey from Proofpoint, a messaging security company.

Almost a third of companies "employ staff to read or otherwise analyze outbound email," while more than fifteen percent have hired people whose primary function is to spy on outgoing corporate email. A quarter have fired an employee for violating corporate email policies. Twenty percent of the companies and almost thirty percent of companies with more than 20,000 employees had been ordered by a court or a regulator to turn over employee emails.

Sometimes, I feel a little lonely on my Oscar blog. The solution: I take a rhetorical baseball bat to a fan favorite, "Borat," and hundreds of rabid commentators appear. Hey, I've got readers.

Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at The Times have never been more in touch with readers' every robustly communicated whim than we are today. Not only do I hear what people are saying, but I also care.

Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next week's column, but maybe I'll write about, ah, blogging instead.

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism - letters to the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader, jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What about ... now? Hmmmm ... Now?

CoComment, the blog comment tracking service that emerged from a Swisscom project, has raised $1.5M from Netage Capital Partners, a Japanese venture fund owned by investment company Netage Group. It acquired a 40 percent stake in the Swiss venture.

Netage has holdings in several RSS projects for the Japanese market, according to its website. It is currently launching CoComment in Japan, said Swisscom in a statement. The Swiss telco also said there had been interest from investors and companies in Europe and the US, but that the Japanese investor brought the "broadest" experience and most "success" in the Internet market to the venture.

The NBA is at an interesting crossroads. There are unique situations today that can enable it to lever up and thrive and push its media customers to new heights, or that could destabilize it.

Its all in the data. And I wish I could tell you about it. But i would get fined for it.

And for the record, I have nothing to say about the finals. That was last season.
For the record, Im not turning on comments, they have devolved to the point where they add no value.

The number of comments in the entire blogosphere is comparable to the number of posts in active, non-spam blogs. Therefore comments constitute up to 30% (150,000) of the daily volume of blog posts (700,000), according to BlogPulse data

Less than 2% of all blog comments are syndicated in feeds

The textual size of the commentsphere is 10 to 20% of the blogosphere

Use of comments is beneficial for ranking blog posts in useful ways

They demonstrate with data that comments are an indicator of the popularity of a weblog

They also do the same for controversy; high comments = high controversy

Clearly comments are undiscovered country and Nielsen BuzzMetrics is working hard to figure out how to search this critical data pool and use it to measure influence. Here here. This data is essential and it's underutilized, yet difficult to mine.

"It is like pollution," said Mark Frauenfelder, the founder and co-editor of Boing Boing, who also writes a personal blog at MadProfessor.net. "It reminds me of visible smog, because it obscures what you want to be looking at. You have to waste brain cycles to filter it out, or, if you own a blog, you have to go through extraordinary measures to keep it out."

But Robert Scoble, whose "Scobleizer--Microsoft Geek Blogger" is hosted on the WordPress.com service, said he is happy with the filtering there.

The Scobleizer blog gets around 10,000 visits a day, and about 400 comments are left on the blog daily. Of those, 100 are spam, Scoble said. Most of these are flagged correctly. However, there are also false positives, valid reader comments identified as unwanted postings, he said.

"We've built technology to solve the problem, we invest in updating it, and our 160-plus bloggers manage the few spams that get through," Weblogs CEO Jason Calacanis said. "The only spam that can really get through our defenses are the ones that are hand-rolled by a person, and we catch most of those."

You're making it into this major problem. If you have the right software and you put in simple rules it's not a major issue. The problem is the software makers, combined with blog owners, have not done a horrible good with their software. If you put in simple controls the problem goes away. Folks just don't install the tools to block comment spam.