Web logs offer users a chance to vent about their frustrations and easily share their comments with anyone who wants to read them, including the boss.
The hype and the temptation surrounding blogs has led many people to sit down at their keyboards and create one. Plenty of options to create one at no cost have become available, as providers like Google, MSN, and AOL recognize the inherent “stickiness” of writing blog entries and inviting others to read them.
It’s those uninvited guests who come along and read your blog that could pose a problem, as the Chicago Tribune writes. Especially if your boss comes along to find you’ve referred to her as “Her Wretchedness” and “the most insane person you have ever witnessed outside of ‘Dateline NBC,'” as the now-mildly infamous web designer Heather Armstrong did three years ago.
Unless their access is restricted in some fashion, the Internet gives people like your boss an open road leading to your blog. Referring to the boss by name makes it that much easier for her to stumble across your vitriol should she be “ego surfing” Google one day. Speaking of Google, they fired one employee, Mark Jen, for blogging a bit too openly about life within the Googleplex. And he wasn’t even being critical.
Businesses like Factiva and Umbria Communications have made products available specifically to cull through millions of blogs for references to corporate clients. Only anonymous bloggers writing about their bosses without naming names can hope to avoid that kind of methodical assault.
If one must blog, one should be prudent about discussing work. Who knows what the boss might be reading today?
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
