I've been reading, thinking and talking about blogging a lot recently, especially here in Germany. If us Europeans have been a little slow embrace blogging generally, it's especially the case with Germany, where I now live.

I'm talking about "Enterprise", "Corporate Blogging" or even "Business Blogging", which is the term I prefer. There are many other brilliant types of blog, but that's not what I want to focus on here.

The reaction for most people (assuming that they've even heard of it - maybe 10% have) is that:

1. They don't really understand why it's important - it's just another of those techie internet things like email.

2. Fear. Because it means that you have to put your head over the parapet and risk exposing yourself (not even your company) to comment, criticism and possibly even ridicule.

In Germany, many companies tend to be very "corporate" and certainly very formal compared to the US and UK, as an example. For instance, it's common for colleagues of many years to still call each other Mr and Mrs (Herr or Frau) and speak to each other with the formal sie, rather than the familiar du.

So the idea, for instance, of a CEO blogging to the world is distinctly alien.

But I believe that they have to master this new communication channel, if they want to continue to compete on the world stage, especially in the technology sector.

Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems wrote recently:

The existence of the Sun and Microsoft blogs is, every day, making our competitors' lives a little harder. This kind of competitive advantage generally just doesn't go unanswered; we are after all living in a free-enterprise system.

If rumours are to be believed, Sun has even had HP's lawyers trying to stop Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz from blogging.

So what do the Business Bloggers get out of it?

There's two levels for blogging. Let's call them "management" and "troops". But they both get the same benefits - dialogue (as in two way communication) with the readers.

Management get a chance to put a human face to their leadership and communicate their agenda and that of their company to employees, customers, end users and and the press. And to tweak their competitors' noses now and again. Jonathan Schwartz does all these things with consummate skill.

And these people can then feedback to the CEO, who is often a little out of touch with what's really happening in her company.

But the troops get as much, if not more, out of blogging.

Imagine you're a programmer for say, Microsoft . You're in your cubicle separated from the actual user of the product you work on, by Microsoft's sales people, their marketing people, the dealers and possibly a few other intermediaries, all jealously guarding their customer relationship.