Firms taking action against worker blogs

updated 10:07 a.m. ET March 7, 2005

NEW YORK - Flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and former Google employee Mark Jen have more in common than their love of blogging: They both got fired over it.  Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites or forwarding racist jokes, few of the policies directly cover blogs, or Web journals, particularly those written outside of work hours.

Simonetti had posted suggestive photographs of herself in uniform, while Jen speculated online about his employer's finances.  In neither case were their bosses happy when they found out.

"There needs to be a dialogue going on between employers and employees," said Heather Armstrong, a Web designer fired for commenting on her blog about goings on at work.  "There's this power of personal publishing, and there needs to be rules about what you can or cannot say about the workplace."

On blogs, which are by their very nature public forums, people often muse about their likes and dislikes — of family, of friends, of co-workers.  Currently, some 27 percent of online U.S. adults read blogs, and 7 percent pen them, according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project.

With search engines making it easy to find virtually anything anyone says in a blog these days, companies are taking notice — and taking action.  "Because it's less formal, you're more likely to say something that would offend your boss," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a workers' rights group.

Armstrong, who wouldn't name the company that fired her in 2002, said some of her bosses took issue with such posts as "Comments Heard In, Around, and Consequent to the Company Christmas Party Last Evening."  Soon after she was sacked, sympathizers coined the term "dooced," meaning "to have lost one's job because of one's Web site," in her case dooce.com.

In 2003, a Microsoft Corp. contractor was fired after posting photographs of computers from rival Apple Computer Inc. at a loading dock.  Because Michael Hanscom had described a building in his posting, Microsoft said he had violated security, he said.

Last fall, Simonetti posted photographs of herself posing in a Delta Air Lines uniform inside a company airplane, her bra partly revealed in one. She was fired weeks later.

And in January, Jen was fired by Google over a blog that discussed life at the company, even though he said "it's all publicly available information and my personal thoughts and experiences."

Upon reflection, Jen said, he understood Google's concerns, given readers' tendencies to read between the lines and draw conclusions based on "random comments I made."

He said he hoped his case would prompt workers to "talk to their managers at length about blogging before they begin."

Simonetti said she still doesn't know what she did wrong, saying that plenty of employee Web sites and dating profiles identify Delta and include photos in uniform.  "If there is a policy against this, why weren't all these people punished before?" she said.

Delta and Google officials would only say that Simonetti and Jen no longer worked for them.

In 1997, blogging pioneer Cameron Barrett lost a job at a small marketing firm in Michigan after co-workers stumbled upon "experimental" short stories from his creative writing class on his site.  Now, he's much more cautious, and he suspended his blog while campaigning for Wesley Clark during the Democratic presidential primaries.  "I knew that everything I wrote would be scrutinized at (a) microscope level by the other campaigns and their supporters," Barrett wrote in an e-mail.

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