My friend Jim Sweeney recently blogged about how only 74 Fortune 500 companies maintain blogs.  For the mathematically challenged like myself, that’s not even 15 percent.

The survey, sponsored by PR giant Burson-Marsteller, was conducted in February – March 2008.  Burson’s Erin Byrne, chief digital strategist, had an interesting quote on the low turnout:

“When I thought about it, I thought that the number would have been higher, and I think the reason…why it still isn’t higher is that companies are still grappling with how they participate in the conversation when they don’t have control over the message.” (emphasis mine)

While it’s pure speculation on Byrne’s part, the fear of “letting go” is an often-used reason why companies don’t blog.  As we know, people are going to say negative things about your company regardless, especially ones as large as Fortune 500, so you may as well have the discussion on your own turf.

However, I’d guess that many of these Fortune 500 companies do want to blog and have employees who would be happy to participate, but haven’t quite figured out the logistics or the goals of said blog(s).   While it seems silly that so many large companies don’t have a blog, no blog is better than something cobbled together just to tell everyone you have one.

In other blog news this week, AOL owned Weblog Inc. is asking their bloggers who are paid per post to halt any posting until after the end of the month.  According to a memo leaked to the Washington Post:

Hi Teams. I’ve spoken to your respective leads about some budget concerns, but wanted to pass along one more last-minute (and unfortunate) effort: we must halt any new posting on the blogs through next Thursday, July 31. There may be some exceptions, and not all blogs will be paused in the same manner.”

The goal is to safeguard against further budget overages, thus protecting our business and hopefully continuing as usual (though maybe a little restrained) in August. Going forward we will remain slightly leaner, but my hope is that by the end of the year we’ll continue to ramp up as we have historically.

This is on the heals AOL is trying to trim their Bluestring, Xdrive, AOL Pictures and MyMobile properties.  Among the Weblog Inc. blogs that are halted include Diylife.com, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and DownloadSquad.

Another monolith, ESPN, unveiled their new foray into the blogsphere with their Football Blog Network this week.  The Network will cover the NFL division by division as well as the NCAA, which will cover DI geographically.  Instead of tapping top notch bloggers from some of the amazing football-related blogs, the Worldwide Leader in Sports poached traditional beat writers from daily newspapers.

While the traditional beat writers have built-in contacts, their first week of blogging was pretty lackluster as a whole, with few links and very little opinion.  In fact, it read just like a newspaper.  You’re a blog, act like one. Not exactly what ESPN wanted, I am sure.