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A BusinessWeek Blogspotting post will serve as the final word on the "Should CEOs blog?" debate:

For CEOs, I don’t think it’s not a question of whether they should or shouldn’t blog. It’s simply a tool that’s available to them if they choose. How they use it is up to them. Maybe a CEO only posts twice a month. That’s OK. Maybe she assigns someone to moderate comments and deal with trolls. Maybe the blog circulates only internally. That’s fine (though leaks to the outside are likely). The point is, a few CEOs, including Schwartz, will be figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Meanwhile, the vast majority of CEOs, agreeing with Taylor, will leave the blogging to others.

The post was in response specifically about conversation around whether the CEO of Sun, Jonathan Schwarz should blog. Here is his own response in an article in the San Jose Mercury News (via Debbie Weil):

"The blog has become for me the single most effective vehicle to communicate to all of our constituencies – developers, media, analysts and shareholders," Schwartz said in an interview in his Silicon Valley office. "When I go out and have dinner with a key analyst on Wall Street or a key investor from Europe and ask them if they’ve read my blog, they almost universally say yes."

To put it bluntly: works for him.

: : Something I’ve realised over the past few weeks, when I’ve been posting less, it that blogging absolutely works for me on a number of levels. It’s not just helpful to the way I work, it has in some ways become integral to it.

Blogging for me is about the discipline thinking out loud. And when you’re really busy, extremely busy, what happens is you stop thinking at all – you’re just doing.

A large part of my job is about keeping up my knowledge of what is happening in media, technology and marketing. It’s not enough to just read all that’s out there –  I need to make sure I have digested, understood and it put it context for myself. When I blog that’s exactly what I’m doing.

And doing your thinking out loud has a ton of side benefits – other people critique your thinking, join in, point you in new directions, offer help. You find like-minded contacts, form useful networks and accelerate your work.

Works for me.

: : UPDATE: Works for Glyn Moody too who added this to the thought:

My thoughts exactly. In fact, I’d go further: blogging has become my
notebook and general repository of digital bits and bobs. Whenever I
find something of interest (to me), I usually bung it up; I hope that
it will be of interest to others, but that’s really secondary. A blog
is as much a very practical tool for my everyday work as an exercise in
itself.