Web 2.0 – Figuring out the best way to set up a forum for customers to access information from other of customers?

The simplest thing you can do is to setup a bulletin board system like pointed out earlier, which can be your first line customer service. This will allow you to participate in the discussion and the whole thread will lead to a solution.

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Should CEOs blog?

you don’t have to pay too much attention to opinions and discussion. What you have to figure out for your organisation is whether you want to participate in the mass collaboration aspect of web 2.0.

It’s not about collecting anymore. It’s about sharing. Read more >>

If you have a blog (hosted on typepad for example) and have the blog feeding into your web-site w/i a frame, does google & other web-sites count the blog as your web-site content?

a clear yes and no  
If you have hosted blog solution google and co will not count the content as something that belongs to your website. YET! the content you submit there will be ranked higher because the blogs you write on will usually have a kick a** pagerank which – if you place links back to your website – you/your website will benefit from. 
That being said: using a blog inside your website is interesting also. Reason being, that you provide your thoughts and insights on your corporate ID, etc. NOTE:! If you pull your feed into your website do not do it with frames because SEs will not index the content properly. Instead, use script to import the RSS feed, reformat it to fit your websites layout and then have it displayed there. 

Which blogging software allows you to host the blog (ie, embed it) directly into your own website?

you can either go the cheap way and pull your RSS feed from an external platform (blogspot, wordpress.com, or whatever) into your website, format it so it looks pretty and voila, there you go. 
Now, the expensive version is to do the same thing I did on my website (http://lars-hilse.de/) which was more of an accident. I had created a website and then integrated my own wordpress blog into there. Cost a lot of tears and sweat though. The point I’m trying to get to is that you’ll have the full functionality which you will NOT! have when you just import the feed (comments, etc.). 

Is the maintenance of project blogs beneficial?

actually I believe so. Yet you have to find out whether there are tools out there that are – in general – even more beneficial, like a Wiki for instance. A blog could definitly be interesting also, that I must admit. 
I recently heard about a programming session a few devs were having. The core was seated in one room and the rest was decentralized across the globe. The means they used to communicate were a software which allowed the synchro altering of the code and they were all connected over an IRC channel which they used to communicate in non-code… That might be referred to as real time mass collaboration I guess  
Yet I would almost go ahead and use an integrated blog/timestamp tool in another solution – something customized. Because a blog is cool approach, but a bit of a broad sword because you need one or more features here (which a blog may not bring along) and can neglect some other tools which the blog-sw brings along but only costs server load, disk space or whatever.

What’s the optimal number of posts to have on your blog’s home page?

There are about 10 kazillion dependencies. Things you have to consider in that context are: 
1. HOW LOAD INTENSIVE IS THE BLOG; meaning how many images are involved in every post and how long is it going to take a modem user (yes, we still have them out there so don’t forget) to load the site completely if there are more then 10 posts on the homepage
2. WHAT FREQUECY does the blog receive new posts in? Which is necssary to determine because some people wanting to share a specific post (and are inexperience blog users) will not send the dedicated link to that specific post but to the blog its self. Now, if you publish 10 articles daily, the friend who received the recommendation email and reads it a day later because he’s a bit lazy on email too, will not find that article but the 10 new ones that have been published since the email was sent to him. 
And those are just two of them. But the most important ones. 
You’ll have probably set up a few blogs in your life. And software packages like WordPress draw from a long time of experience. So if their standard settings is 10, I’d say it all boils down to that, I suppose. 
If you need more help please feel free to contact me. 

Blog or Newsletter or Both?

Although the number of newsletter subscribers is globally declining I would still not consider NLs to be obsolete as they are the usual way for the “elderly” to get their information. RSS in blogs is still taken as geek-toy sort of thing and has not yet convinced the general public. 
What you can do is take wordpress, integrate it seemlessly into your corporate presentation on the web and offer the blog articles to be subscribed to via email. I am just on a project where we have utilized that technology and are about to go live. I am keen to see what the result will be. 
With these modules you can either send every post via email as soon as it’s published or you can kick out a digest weekly. This way you will not fill up people’s inboxes with too much stuff. 
Combining the two will really save some time on the publishers end. 
If you need more help please feel free to contact me.