Bloggers want bosses to clarify what's out of bounds
By Stephanie Armour
USA Today
Like a growing number of employees, Peter Whitney decided to launch a blog on the Internet to chronicle his life, his friends and his job at a division of Wells Fargo.
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Jack Gruber • USA Today
hen he began taking jabs at a few people he worked with.
Mark Jen of San Francisco says he was fired from Google this year because of his blog, in which he wrote comments about future potential products. He recently helped draft the first blog policy for consumer Internet service Plaxo, his new employer.
His blog at gravityspike.blogspot.com did find an audience: his bosses. In August 2004, the 27-year-old was fired from his job handling mail and the front desk, he says, after managers learned of his Web log, or blog.
His story is more than a cautionary tale. Delta Air Lines, Google and other major companies are firing and disciplining employees for what they say about work on their blogs, which are personal sites that often contain a mix of frank commentary, freewheeling opinions and journaling.
And it's hardly just an issue for employees: Some major employers such as IBM are passing first-of-a-kind employee blogging guidelines designed to avoid problems, such as online publishing of trade secrets, without stifling the kind of blogs that can also create valuable buzz about a company.
"Right now, it's too gray. There need to be clearer guidelines," says Whitney, who has found another job. "Some people go to a bar and complain about workers, I decided to do it online. Some people say I deserve what happened, but it was really harsh. It was unfair."
Wells Fargo would not comment, but a spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the company doesn't have a blogging policy.
Blogs are proliferating as fast as computer viruses. According to a report this year by public-relations firm Edelman and Intelliseek, a provider of business intelligence solutions, about 20,000 new blogs are created daily, and an estimated 10 million U.S. blogs will exist by the end of 2005. Together, the vast universe of blogs link up to create what is known as a blogosphere, a collective Internet conversation that is one of the fastest-growing areas of new content on the Internet.
More than 8 million adults in the U.S. have created blogs, according to two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit research center studying the Internet's social effects. And 32 million Americans are blog readers — a 58 percent jump in 2004.
Potential risks
Employers are just beginning to wake up to the potential risk that blogs pose.
"The law is trying to catch up with the technology," says Allison Hift, a telecommunications and technology lawyer in Miami. "This is like what we saw a few years ago with employers passing policies about e-mail. Now we're seeing it with Web logs."
There are myriad concerns. 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. 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 number of employment lawyers such as Hift and bloggers such as Whitney are urging companies to enact guidelines and communicate blogging rules to employees.
Some companies are doing just that: In May, IBM unveiled blogging guidelines for its 329,000 employees. The guidelines state that employees should identify themselves (and, when relevant, their roles at IBM) when blogging about IBM. "You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM," the guidelines state. The guidelines also say that bloggers should not use "ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc.," and that they "show proper consideration" for "topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory — such as politics and religion."
Stifling free speech?
But it's tricky. Some civil libertarians fear blogophobic companies may adopt policies that stifle the free exchange that has made blogs so popular.
"The concern is that it becomes a chilling effect," says Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties organization dealing with high-tech issues. "We don't want people to feel like ... they can't express their feelings."
Guidelines, some bloggers say, could even help save jobs. When Ellen Simonetti started her blog chronicling her life and work as a Delta Air Lines flight attendant, she posted pictures of herself on her site, queenofsky.journalspace.com. There's a shot of her in her blue uniform, bending over an airline seat as her white bra peeks out, another of her in her uniform, sprawled across the tops of the seats of an empty plane.
Simonetti, 30, of Austin, Texas, says she was fired in October 2004 for the pictures on her blog. She has filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, saying the suspension amounted to discrimination, because male employees with similar online photos were not disciplined. The EEOC case is pending.
Mark Jen, 22, of San Francisco, started a blog in January to chronicle his life and new job at Google. He wrote comments about future potential products and lost his job two weeks later, he says, because of his blog at 99zeros.blogspot.com.
At his new job at Mountain View, Calif.-based Plaxo, a consumer Internet service for updating and accessing contact information, Jen helped draft the company's first-ever blog policy. The policy says, in part, that employees can't violate the privacy or publicity rights of another, can't personally attack employees, authors, customers, vendors or shareholders and can't post material that is "hateful or embarrassing to another person."
