The big boys are blogging. Fortune 500 companies are slowly but surely getting onboard with the business blogging wave…but like the rest of us, they’re just trying to figure it out. In fact, I’d venture to say that Fortune 500 companies are behind the times, and behind what many smaller businesses are doing with blogging. They’re big, corporate machines, with lots of complicated politics, policies, etc.

Now, Easton Ellsworth of Know More Media and Business Blogwire is spearheading the Fortune 500 Blog Project.

In a nutshell, from the site, here’s what it’s about:

The Fortune 500 Blog Project is an independent, volunteer-driven project to identify and evaluate public-facing corporate blogs owned and/or operated by Fortune 500 companies. Secondary purposes of this project include finding out to what degree Fortune 500 companies are using internal corporate blogs, and highlighting blogs that discuss Fortune 500 companies.

The site is a wiki – anyone can sign-up, pick a Fortune 500 company and get into it. Do the research, write reviews of their blogs, and tell the overall community what’s going on with the big corporate muck-a-mucks.

Popularity for the project is growing.

Why is something like this important?

Business blogging is a legitimate and extremely valuable marketing, sales, public relations, and community outreach endeavor. Big or small, businesses can get a lot of value out of blogging. A project like this helps us get a better sense of what’s out there, what companies are doing, what works and what doesn’t. It opens up immense lines of communication within the community and ideally to these businesses. And when we start to see positive and productive blog efforts out of Fortune 500 companies, I guarantee it will improve our current framework for successful business blogging.

So kudos to Easton and everyone else involved! Keep track of the Fortune 500 Blog Project, we’re going to gain a lot of valuable insight and discussion from it over time.

[tags]easton ellsworth, fortune 500 blogs, fortune 500 blog project, know more media, blogging, business blogs, business blogging, online community, social media[/tags]