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.

More than a third of UK bloggers risk the sack by posting derogatory or damaging details about their workplace, boss or colleagues, a survey claims.

Human resources company Croner, which commissioned the study, warned that such bloggers could be sacked from their job for gross misconduct.

Croner surveyed 2,000 people who keep a personal internet blog or diary and 39% said that they made harmful comments.

Bloggers should consider the potential impact of all postings, Croner said.

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.

The audio comment window contains a Java applet which controls the audio recording and previewing capabilities. After your visitor has recorded their audio comments, they'll provide you with their name and email address and send it to our servers.

At first, my traditional side immediately thought, this is a very very bad idea. Honestly, all I could think of was being forced to listen to, not simply read spam. But is that overblown? Spammers probably wouldn't take the time to record messages?

Still, even without the spectre of spam floating greasily above the room, my traditional side still wins. I would still rather read comments on this blog. So it would have to be a specific kind of blog where you would want to hear them.

OR you can even use the entire system in "reverse" and send yourself audio comments, then mark them public, and let the rest of your site visitors listen to them - sort of like "Quick podcasting."

"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.

While I love comments-and would never consider turning them off on this blog-I don't quite grasp the notion that the conversation is somehow inhibited without comments. Blogging godfather Dave Winer hasn't offered comments on his blog for a long time, and has publicly dismissed the notion that a blog without comments isn't a blog. In a 15-month-old article in the Online Journalism Review that dealt with blog spam, Winer suggested it's painfully easy to comment on blogs that don't support comments: Commenters should simply run their own blog if they want to comment.

To that end, Winer recently introduced a subtle new feature to his blog. The little green Technorati icon appears above the fold in the right-hand column. Click it; it takes you to the Technorati page showing all items that link to Winer's blog. In other words, it's just like reading the comments left on a comment-enabled blog. Today, Winer notes that the tag has been successful (aside from some "snarky" feedback).

According to estimates by the market research firm NetRatings Japan Inc., about 14.95 million Web users accessed blogs on sites provided by one of the 14 major Internet service providers, like Rakuten and Nifty, at least once in February from home computers.