USA Today Revives Fired Blogger Story

Posted on June 15, 2005

USA Today has pieced together the story of the fired bloggers again. Apparently, this news story will never get old. Here are some of the fired bloggers the article mentions:

Peter Whitney was fired from Wells Fargo for his blog.

Mark Jen was fired from Google for his blog. Jen now works for Plaxo and has a new blog.

Ellen Simonetti was fired from Delta Air Line for the pictures on her blog.

Heather Armstrong fired for her blog in 2002. Her blog dooce.com has since won blog awards and is highly ranked in the Technorati 100.

If you have been following the story you have probably heard most of these names before. Even though it repeated some old news, the article did have a good paragraph on why employers are concerned about blogs:

The concerns are myriad. Employees who create blogs set up a direct way to communicate about their company with the public, because customers and clients can stumble across a blog. (Blogs often jump to the top of search engines because they are updated often.) Bloggers may spill trademark or copyright material on their sites, they may post pictures of yet-to-be-released products, and they may libel or slander another employee or a client.
A blogger can even get the ear of Congress. Douglas Roberts, a computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., started a blog, and anonymous posters blasted management as incompetent. During a House subcommittee hearing in May, the blog was mentioned in a discussion about the fate of the nuclear research facility.