A Peculiar Blog

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It shouldn’t, but there’s an increasing number of cases where people have been fired because of blogging. There’s a post on Wired Blogs that talks about a survey that claims “Nearly Ten Percent of Companies Have Fired Bloggers“.

Why does this happen? Sometimes an employee will be fired because they’re blogging while AT work when they should be on the job. The solution there is simple, don’t blog while at work unless you and your boss are clear that it’s ok for you to be doing so. If you’re hired to do a job then the employer has every reason to expect you to do that job and not be doing your own thing on company time.

In other cases people have been fired because of what they’ve written in their blogs (or on messag boards, chat rooms, etc) that either violates company policy or just makes somebody angry. In any event, it happens. Fortunately there are some things that can be done.

The first thing is easy: Don’t do your blogging on company time and preferably, don’t do it on company equipment or connections at all. This one step would save a lot of people a lot of grief.

If you write about your employer, be aware that more and more employers are taking time to Google their employees and among other things, check out what they’re writing in their blogs. don’t use names of co-workers or supervisors, don’t mention trade secret type stuff or anything that the company wants to be kept classified.

There are, of course, times when people feel that they need to blog about their employers as a form of whistleblowing. In cases like this, or if you just want to be sure that your boss can’t connect anything you’ve said online to you, the answer is to blog anonymously.

Anonymity can be had, though it does take a little bit of work and a bit of effort to learn some things needed. Over the next week or two I’m going to be doing a series of entries that will cover how to surf the web anonymously, how to send anonymous email and how use those to create a blog and post on it anonymously.

Technorati Tags: blogging, anonymity, anonymous+blogging, anonymous+email, anonymous+web+surf, privacy

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