Cisco is facing a lawsuit after an employee - who happend to be in charge of Cisco’s Intellectual Property Division - criticized other companies on his personal blog. The companies that came under fire are now suing the company, claiming the employee should have disclosed his Cisco affiliation.

Anne at CNET wonders today if a new spate of blog lawsuits may be coming as employees are increasingly given, and taking, the freedom to discuss company issues. My guess is that companies have little to worry about. Several prominent bloggers have been talking about their companies for years with few detrimental effects and many positive ones. Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo has both complimented and criticized Yahoo many times in his long blogging career.

Rather than hurting the company this level of transparency arguably helps with credibility and gives readers the kind of “reality check” that official corporate blogs cannot provide. Other prominent personal bloggers who became something of the de-facto company bloggers are Matt Cutts at Google and Jeff Barr of Amazon, though more recently the companies have established their own blogs, Google on a very large number of Google related topics.

Corporate blogging advocate Robert Scoble in his book with Shel Israel called “Naked Conversations”, argues that companies should encourage personal blogging as well as establish corporate blogs as part of their media strategy to engage with customers on a more personal and more detailed level than simple advertising will provide. I think this is the best advice for the long term, and that lawsuits will be few and far between.