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Move over corporate news release. Blogs could soon be the next vehicle through which public companies release significant performance and financial data.

Securities and Exchange Commission head Christopher Cox has invited CEO and avid corporate blogger Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems to meet with the SEC on this very topic of allowing companies to disclose significant financial information using blogs.

Schwartz sparked the discussion in a recent blog post, where he argued that blogs could be used as a way to expand access to information by investors – part of Reg FD, or Regulation Fair Disclosure, which ensures that no one audience gets preferential access to material non-public information. What’s even more interesting about this story is that SEC’s Cox responded to Schwartz’s blog by posting a comment on Sun’s blog.

According to an AP story, “a growing number of major companies (30, according to the Fortune 500 Blogging Wiki, according to the AP story) now publish corporate blogs or online diaries, allowing CEOs to communicate directly to investors and in doing so, bypassing the gatekeepers in PR departments, as well as journalists and industry analysts.

The SEC position, as reported by AP, is that “current regulations do allow for blogs, like news releases, regulatory filings, Web sites and Webcasts, to be used to disseminate companies’ financial information, provided a particular blog reaches a broad audience.” 

What needs to be ironed out, says Cox in this article, is if the “widespread dissemination requirement of Regulation FD can be satisfied through Web disclosure—among the questions that would need to be addressed is whether there exist effective means to guarantee that a corporation uses its Web site in ways that assure broad non-exclusionary access ....”

As the AP story highlights, Schwartz said his blog attracts 50,000 viewers a month, and has become the single most effective vehicle to communicate with investors, journalists and analysts.

Let the discussions begin!