Corporate blogs don’t have to be all self-promotion and pointless. Major League Baseball averted a full-blown catastrophe last week by using its blog to communicate service issues with disgruntled customers. And as a reporter, I increasingly prefer the straightforward blog language to the migraine-inducing hyperbole of press releases. So which corporate video blogs are worth checking out? Here are just a few of our faves.

YouTube
Updated: Daily (roughly)
Topics: Site features/news/theme video packages
Notes: Contests, new features, world news — it’s all in the YouTube blog. The site is actually a good source of official information, especially on lesser announcements from the company. (MSN and Yahoo take note.)
Location: http://youtube.com/blog

Vimeo
Updated: Weekly (roughly)
Topics: Site features/news
Notes: Vimeo’s blog is more like a conversation with its users. It talks about new functionality on the site, experiments the site is conducting (like with 30 fps HD conversions), and alerts people to issues the site is having (like when there was an influx of Stage 6′ers).
Location: http://www.vimeo.com/blog/


Next New Networks
Updated: Irregularly
Topics: Site news/programming highlights/bits from around the web
Notes: What’s good about the NNN blog is that its not afraid to link outside the corporate walls. Sure, waxes on about its own shows, but it also talks about stuff on rival networks.
Location: http://blog.nextnewnetworks.com/

MeeVee
Updated: Daily (but who knows for how much longer)
Topics: TV news and info
Notes: MeeVee may be publicly announcing it’s for sale, but you wouldn’t know it from its blog. Though it’s light on corporate news, “TV with MeeVee” is a nice bridge between oldteevee and newteevee, highlighting stuff on the boobtube as well as tie-ins you can find online.
Location: http://blog.meevee.com/my_weblog/

Those are just a smattering of sites worth your time. (You don’t even want to know how many blogs Liz and I go through each day.) Startups should look to these to learn how to leverage the immediacy of blogs to be an effective tool of not just spreading news but providing additional entertainment to their customers as well.