Would you believe that in 2005, employees reading blogs will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs unrelated to their work, on their bosses’ time? No? Well, what about 2.3 million work years (calculated on the basis of a typical nearly 40-hour work week)?

These startling figures are in the October 24 AdAge story What Blogs Cost American Business (free subscription required to read the story).

Sprinkled through the story there are clues that the stated figures need to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, half way through, well after the shock of the headline, and under the sub-head ‘Wasted time’, we get "Hard and detailed data on blogging time is limited, so Ad Age’s analysis is a best-guess extrapolation …" Oh, really? Does that mean what it sounds like, i.e. "we have a fair idea but we can’t really prove it"?

And "strong evidence" of "workday blogging" (posting? reading?) is based on figures for spikes in business hours traffic for Blogads and Feedburner traffic. So what would “weak evidence� look like? What the taxi drivers are saying?

Yet whatever the weaknesses in the argument or the caveats on the statistics cited, business blog consultants surely need to recognize that business owners who are employers may be encouraged by articles like this (there will no doubt be more) to be super cautious about getting aboard the blogging train. They might wonder, for example, whether by being enthusiastic about blogging, CEOs were in effect encouraging their staff to spend a lot of time on activity which did not evidently contribute to productivity.

There are some significant human resources management issues here for businesses which make a commitment to blogging and even for businesses with the “not interested� sign out – for one thing, their staff may be very interested and some will be reading blogs and some of those will also be blogging, if not now, real soon.

Having a code of conduct on blogging could help.

Recently, to assist a client of mine, I did some research online to find such a code of conduct, a clear, unequivocal set of rules or principles which business owners could apply to cover blogging at work and in relation to work. I found a lot of opinion and a few attempts at a code, but not a clear-cut set of principles that business owners generally could be expected to adopt. And let’s face it, there’s probably a generational issue lying in wait here, except maybe for companies with CEOs under 35.

I was intrigued by one particular comment in the article, an observation attributed to Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings, that at-work blog time is "probably" done in addition to regular surfing. In other words, the people who have been doing non work-related internet browsing are now also blogging or reading non work-related blogs at work. If true, that would mean that more of the "boss’s time" is being wasted by the same people already doing unproductive internet surfing, rather than their simply substituting blogging and reading blogs for more traditional internet surfing. What does that say about, for example, marketing to readers of blogs?