Monday, April 18, 2005

Bloggers Beware!!

Today's New York Times has an article on bloggers who either got reprimanded or fired from their jobs after their employers read their blogs on their presonal websites that were written on their own time at home. (NYTimes.com) One guy got canned from Google for writing about the company's financial condition. The article says, "...even in their living rooms, even in their private basement computer caves, employees are required to be at least a little bit worried about losing their jobs if they write or post the wrong thing on their personal Web logs." A policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, was quoted:
"I would have expected that some of the louder, more strident voices on the Internet would have risen up in a frenzy over this. But that didn't happen." Why not, do you think?

1 comment:

Aaron Veenstra said...

There's usually a slight flurry when this happens (see also "dooce") but I suspect the main reason it doesn't have any staying power as an issue of concern is that bloggers generally don't expect to be treated much differently than offline media folks (or at least, the people who might raise a fuss don't have that expectation). If you publish a newsletter with a bunch of internal corporate financial information, you can expect to get fired. If you're spending your on-the-clock time working on your own personal newsletter, you can expect to get fired.