A flight attendant at Delta was recently fired for posting pictures of herself in uniform in her blog. Who knows what else is behind that story but Google gave the boot to an employee for discussing sensitive information in a blog. Friendster got rid of some programmers for posting stuff that the company apparently didn’t like. This is interesting considering that these companies are supposed to be the leaders of getting everyone to use the internet as a tool for communication, expression, etc. Also MS supposedly fired some contractors for posting some pictures of Apple hardware being delivered to the campus. I’ve heard of a few other incidents at other companies too. I guess you have to watch what you say these days. My blog is pretty boring (b.l.o.g. = Boring Life Of Geeks?) so I guess I can say whatever I want. This is lucky for me because I just happened to grab a seat next to Bill Gates riding the city bus to work the other day. He was downloading some songs from his Linux laptop onto his IPod. He asked me what the name of the new J-Lo song is that’s on the radio so he could find it. I couldn’t recall so when we arrived at the office, we used Google to search for it and RealPlayer to listen to a sample of the track that we found. We had to actually download the file though because somehow the FireFox browser we were using just didn’t get along with the RP plug-in for some reason. Crazy story, right? (And me too). I’m just trying to show that companies should lighten up a bit. However, employees should respect confidentiality agreements and what not. The older I get, the more I learn about this crazy concept called compromise. But, I’m calling my lawyer just in case.

 

Stan

 

P.S.

There are stories of bloggers actually getting other people fired for better or worse.