Updated: 17/9/05; 14:37:53
 Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Blogging may be bad for your career

Ellen Simonetti aka Queen of the Sky has lost her job because of posting to her weblog. It was allegedly because she posted pictures of herself in her work uniform and presumably her employer didn't like that kind of publicity. Although this is the first example that I've seen of someone losing their job because of their weblog, I expect it won't be the last. As employers begin to realize that their employees are publishing comments about their work to a wider audience, including potential customers and competitors, then we can expect them to be developing anti-blogging policies. Just as it took a while for the publishing industry to realize the extend of music sharing using P2P technology before it began to act, so businesses are slowly realizing that their employees are writing about their work online. It's naive to think that all employers will embrace the data mining or knowledge management potential of their employees by encouraging weblogs. In many cases weblogs will be perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a threat. How they respond to that threat may have important implications for many webloggers.