Comments on: “nobody’s ever been fired for blogging”

By: Nacha

Nacha — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 00:03:04 +0000

Hi! Parrot-breeders

By: Nacha

Nacha — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 11:23:49 +0000

Hi! Parrot-breeders

By: Sar

Sar — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:21:43 +0000

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By: Bob

Bob — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 23:00:22 +0000

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By: mark

mark — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 14:13:09 +0000

keep bloging

By: Juniordiary

Juniordiary — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 23:48:20 +0000

ApplyYourself Hack: What Should Be Done?

If you applied to b-school, you probably had the “fairly mediocre experience”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/000539.html of using “ApplyYourself”:http://applyyourself.com/, a service that allows you to apply, and track the status of your applications, …

By: barb dybwad

barb dybwad — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 07:15:14 +0000

I think you and Anil make a good point, which is essentially “For maximum job security, don’t be an idiot in any medium.” But I do think there is something peculiar about the blog medium itself that is pushing on the boundary of public vs. private in new ways. In some of the “fired for blogging” cases there is a clear place one might point to that says “the information they published should have remained private,” but when you look at a case like the Mark Jen case, it’s still really not clear that he divulged any specific item or items that were trade secrets of some sort – it’s more that Google seems to have taken issue with his general level of openness in what he was talking about on his blog, and that’s a grey area that has been opened up by the blogging medium itself, because there’s a much larger corpus of speech (rather, writing) that bloggers routinely make public. In other words, the advent of blogging means there are a hell of a lot more of us with a large body of printed communication that is up for scrutiny. It’s bound to lead to more of these grey area decisions; imagine a health insurance company refusing to provide coverage to a new employee who gets diagnosed with a serious illness, because they check his blog and find that he started talking about his symptoms for several months before joining the company and signing up for the health plan. Is that an acceptable practice, because one could argue there is a public record of a pre-existing condition? These are the kind of things we might want to give thought to before we see them start happening.

I think the fact that there is no “scarcity” in the medium – the time and cost between experience and the public sharing of that experience have fallen to zero – does in some way tweak the fundamental idea of what ought to be private versus what ought to be public, and brings in to sharp focus the fact that every person and every entity operates at a different frequency in this regard. And it stirs in me a deeper question about ownership of experience – there is part of me that wants to believe that anything that happens to me is in a sense “owned” by me – I was there, I experienced it and I know it to be true. However, there are all kinds of cases in which I am asked to suspend my ownership of that experience, because the other parties involved have some sort of power to decide that I am not allowed to disclose details about it – I have lost the right to convey that experience. I’m not saying it’s never justified, but I am saying that it’s a rather interesting bargain for so many of us to strike so frequently.

By: Success Blogging

Success Blogging — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 06:47:13 +0000

More blogginers weigh in on blog “firings”

Anil Dash and Danah Boyd are extremely popular bloggers.

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 06:52:39 +0000

Thanks, Mr. Barry, that’s where I was going, and you got there first.

What is *with* this automatic assumption that anything an employer objects to an employee saying is automatically wrong? That an employer is *right* to fire somebody — and without warning, too — over something said in public?

Not saying, by the way, that that’s always wrong — just that it’s not always *right*, either, yet it sure seems to be treated that way, in this case and others.

By: Bruce Barry

Bruce Barry — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 08:40:52 +0000

I am an academic working on a book on freedom of speech and expression in and around the workplace. I would welcome contact from people who have been disciplined or dismissed for expressive activity, online or otherwise. Many thanks.

Regarding the subject of the post itself: Sure, some bloggers (or online forum posters) who say truly inappropriate things or reveal proprietary information about their employers are being fired for acting stupidly, not for blogging. There are, however numerous cases in and out of the courts over the last couple of decades of individuals disciplined or fired for speech that really could and should be protected, but for an employment-at-will system that does not protect one’s political opinions from employer sanction. This is, by the way, not the case in many other countries. The right to have and express political opinions without being punished by an employer is embedded in an international labor rights convention that 160 countries have ratified (but not the U.S., it will perhaps not surprise you to learn).