Chris Anderson of the Long Tail blog (and the editor and chief at Wired magazine) has announced a research project around his notion that Fortune 500 companies that blog tend to do so usually only when they're in trouble. He points to highly-inconclusive data indicating that Fortune 500 firms that blog have suffered lower share price performance over the past year than those that don't blog.

I was the writer that Chris and Wired originally hired to produce an article on this subject. The article was eventually killed because the evidence I found did not prove the original proposition that there's a correlation between share price performance and the decision by a company to start blogging.

While Chris notes lower one-year share performance for F500 companies that blog vs. those that don't, statistically this is no more relevant, as Sun's Jonathan Schwartz told me, than "the share price performance of firms whose CEO's answer their own email vs. those that don't."

The problem is that the percentage of F500 companies that blog is too small, the time period looked at in share performance to short, and the factors and timing behind any one company's decision to start blogging too varied to lend any real support (as yet) to Chris's original supposition.

Plus, when you factor in the five year data on share performance -- and especially the 5-year share performance against industry averages -- this makes even less of a case that share price is any real indicator of whether or not a company decides to blog.

True, there are a number of firms that started blogging clearly because they were suffering image problems that their traditional PR methods failed to redress -- Microsoft, GM and Boeing are cases in point. Interestingly, though, while Microsoft's share price is down nearly 9% the past year, Boeing's is up 29%. Go figure.

Which is exactly my point.

Meanwhile, other companies such as IBM and Sun are clearly blogging because they're enmeshed in network culture and wanted to get closer to their customers and developers. That's just a fact.

One other hardly-minor problem with Chris's supposition:

If you're trying to show that it's corporate malaise that induces companies to blog, then you've got to look at their share price performance PRIOR to starting to blog, which is different for every company.

To say that GM's share price performance over the last year that it's blog has been in existence is down 29% tells us NOTHING about what induced it to decide to start blogging 15 months ago when the decision was first made.

If you want to make any correlation between the last year's share price performance and GM's blogging efforts -- and it would be foolish to do so -- you could only conclude that blogging had hurt the company.

But in fact, as I note in my "First Year Report for GM's Blog" , there's no evidence that it has hurt the company and more than a little evidence that it has helped GM -- at least in the image and PR arenas.

The fact is there's no way to make the firm correlation Chris wants to make between corporate share price doldrums and the decision to start blogging.