Case study

         
            Blogging can get one fired.                                                                                                                              
           The most famous example, because it involved a big and powerful company, was the case of Mark Jen, an employee of the leading online search engine, Google.  

           When Jen joined Google, he created a blog, ninetyninezeros, which he described as “a personal journal of my life at google.” The blog, written in his spare time, described what he did at Google, the orientation process, the way the company was managed, and other details about the experience of working at Google.

           One of Jen’s posts dealt with Google’s system of benefits, including free meals and on-site doctors, and with the upside and downside of this way of distributing benefits: “Every 'benefit' is on site so you never leave work… between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in” (Weinman, 2005). He also mentioned that Google’s health care plan was not as good as Microsoft’s (his previous employer). Google’s management felt that this and other posts on Jen’s blog were problematic, for the leaked to the public the inner workings of the company.

         Jen’s employers asked him to remove from his blog any posts that could be construed as giving away company secrets, and he did so. Nonetheless, even after he had removed that material, Jen was fired two days later, and, as he wrote on his blog, “either directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason” (Weinman, 2005).

        Consquently, the firing of Mark Jen caused great dismay throughout the blogosphere, where bloggers worried that they might be next to lose their jobs over an ill-advised comment about work. And the biggest problem was that no one seemed to know what the rules were when it came to blogging about work – not even the people who had been fired for it (Weinman, 2005).