Perhaps question blog is the wrong phrase, but it's as close a description as any at this point. While attending Gnomedex, I talked about the Three P's of interacting with Bloggers.

When I left the main session room, I bumped into Chris Aarons and Geoff Nelson from AMD. We proceeded to have a long discussion about how large corporations can interact with the blogosphere, especially given the spec of "a modern, Internet age chip company constrained by an old school legal department".

We actually spent some time kicking around basic concepts and terminology, like "what is a corporate blog?". One view was that it had to be executive level commentary to be a "corporate" blog...and that sort of pre-digested, high level content was in fact less useful than a more personal tone.

Bryght's corporate blog (which is what you're reading right now, at least my corner of it) is simply the sum of all of the team's posts. There is no on-message vs. off-message, and really no constraints. We all have personal blogs (as well as a few other places we put content), so we tend to post technology or business items that are more closely related with Bryght here. But a lot of the time there is great relevant content that doesn't end up here :)

Chris and Geoff's view was that there was no way that legal would allow the type of real-time, unconstrained interaction that tends to typify blogging today. I tried to brainstorm different ways of connecting with an enthusiast community without actually blogging. And so, a question blog. The basic concept is as follows:

• The community can post questions to a central site (e.g. ask.domain.com)
• Other community members can digg-style vote for questions to help select which ones should be answered first
• A question moderator sifts through the highest rated questions and finds the appropriate internal folks to route the questions to
• The internal people answer the questions, which then get routed to legal for review and approval
• Any changes and updates are bounced back and forth with legal, until an approved version is agreed on*
• The answer is posted (which of course goes into an RSS feed plus email notification); maybe the original submitter gets a prize of some kind
• Key point: the posted answer clearly lists the name of the employee, good for tracking down at live events and conferences**

Ideally, the moderation and approval process could be handled entirely by a workflow system that notified the appropriate folks at each step of the way. The question moderator could send the question to a class or group of people, one of whom would sign up to "own" the question.

*special bonus power: get a question answering upgrade that lets you duck legal once a month -- or something. Give me a break -- I'm trying to come up with something that could actually get *approved*. "Just blog it" isn't as easy to sell as it sounds...

** bonus upgrade #2: link to a profile of the employee that has a picture, some details, and links to all the other questions they have answered

Want to implement this idea? Well, Bryght might be able to do some of the development or at least point you to some smart Drupal developers, but I recommend Darren and Julie's Capulet Communications as a great PR firm that knows tech and knows the live web. The social and marketing aspects of this are the most important part.

Oh, and if you need to get in touch with folks at AMD to get an interview, answer some deep technical questions, or just in general connect with a human being, contact me -- I can put you in touch with Chris Aarons, who will be more than happy to pass along requests.