A colleague asked me what percentage of Fortune 500 companies are blogging. Interesting, though I don’t know. (Let’s presume we’re talking about just public blogs, and real blogs, not faux blogs or intranet blogs.) I guessed somewhere in the 3-6% range currently. Unfortunately, the Fortune 500 list is now a premium feature of Fortune.com, so I’m doing a simple gut-check on what firms make the list at this point. But here’s a short list off the top of my head:

• GM
• Sun Microsystems
• Microsoft
• Google
• Yahoo!
• Boeing

That’s 1.2% right there, but I haven’t really thought too hard about it yet. Who am I missing?

UPDATE:
I’m not sure Google and Yahoo! are technically 2004 Fortune 500 (I’m working on finding a friend with a login so I can check), but if not they miss it by a hair’s breadth, given each of their $3+ billion in revenue last year.

Reader John Ridings points out that Cisco also has a blog.

Jeremy Wright adds a post on his blog of all the F500 companies he knows of with internal blogs, which is naturally a lot longer than this one of public blogs.

Steve Rubel suggests taking those and making a stock index out of them, which he bets would track better than the S&P 500.

Debbie Weil points out that HP also has several blogs.

http://devresource.hp.com/blogs/index.jsp

Mercury News reports:

In a case with implications for the
freedom to blog, a San Jose judge tentatively ruled Thursday that Apple
Computer can force three online publishers to surrender the names of
confidential sources who disclosed information about the company’s
upcoming products.

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg refused to
extend to the Web sites a protection that shields journalists from
revealing the names of unidentified sources or turning over unpublished
material.

Strange, because I thought that journlaists also didn’t have those rights. Anyway, the lesson is clear: be careful what you blog.