Thirty Fortune 500 companies are now publishing corporate blogs. Sun Microsystems was yet to step into this new era of web technology, but not for long. The chief executive of Sun Microsystems. Jonathan I. Schwartz, has requested the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to allow companies to disclose certain financial information through their blogs. With a growing number of companies publishing corporate, and an S.E.C. chairman with an inclination for technological innovation, Mr. Schwartz is making the case for blogs, including his own on the Sun Web site, as a way to expand investors’ access to information. The S.E.C. currently allows blogs to be used to publicize a company’s financial information, but the blog must reach a broad audience (Figure Unknown, they didn’t reply my email yet).

In a Sept. 25 letter to the S.E.C. chairman Schwartz noted that Sun’s Web site gets an average of nearly a million user hits a day, including the blog that he writes as chief executive and those of thousands of Sun employees.Mr. Schwartz wrote:

“Its content is ‘pushed’ to subscribers. This Web site is a tremendous vehicle for the broad delivery of timely and robust information about our company.”

Mr. Schwartz’s letter does not specify number of readers in his blog, as opposed to the Web site in general(Cause my research[Alexa & Google] shows it has only few thousand visitors last week), so more data would be needed to determine whether it meets the criterion of broad distribution under the regulation, in the S.E.C.’s view.An S.E.C. spokesman, John Nester, said that agency regulations contemplate

“Web-based disclosure and that’s why the rule does not proscribe any particular method of dissemination — so long as it is broad and non-exclusionary.”

This will be serious breakthrough for Sun, since its rivals are already few steps ahead in adopting and utilizing blog as a tool to attract investor. For better investor relationship SEC’s permission to disclose financial information is vital for Sun Microsystems.

Source:[LAtimes,Business Week]