There have been quite a few articles in the media reporting on people who have gotten fired from their jobs for blogging. Recently we've also been seeing articles about how off the record comments can get people fired, as may have been the case with CNN's Eason Jordan. I've been wondering how all of this negative press about weblogs is being received.

First off, I don't find it particularly bad form to round up the wagons around a cause as bloggers often do with public figures such as politicians. But the recent use of weblogs to rally around isolated comments made by individuals and the effect it has on their careers is a little surprising to me, but not entirely so. Bloggers are feeling the power of their voice and are passionately exercising that power. Ryan Underwood, in Fast Company, likened the Jordan blogging to a witch hunt and advises bloggers, however, to heed the maxim that what comes around goes around. Good advice. Rebecca Blood's reaction to all of this provides some cogent observations about responsibility, ethics and using common sense with regard to using weblogs. I'm also in agreement with what Anil Dash has been saying. The negativity surrounding blogs cannot be too good for our medium.

Rony Abovitz, the author of the blog entry that publicized the comments made by Eason Jordan which eventually led to his resignation from CNN, made this comment in the New York Times.

He hoped bloggers could develop loftier goals than destroying people's careers. "If you're going to do this open-source journalism, it should have a higher purpose," he said. "At times it did seem like an angry mob, and an angry mob using high technology, that's not good."

This quote makes it seem as though the conservative mob organized to expose and remove Jordan. I admit that I haven't gone out and read the threads following Abovitz's entry, but I can't imagine how any open discussion like this leads so quickly to an employee being asked to resign (if that's what happened). It doesn't make sense that he should have resigned. Why can't the world take a breath and remove itself from the busy throng of discussion and put this all in context before we go writing resignation letters? Jay Rosen says CNN's answer to this miscommunication should have been more communication, not running away from or hiding the issue. Dialog is what weblogging is about and the very medium that flamed the fire could have been used to put it out.

Sigh. I suppose such is the case with someone like Jordan who, in a position of influence and in the wake of Dan Rather's re-assignment was victim to this craziness. For those people, it seems, every word has to be considered before being uttered. Or to put it more succinctly, talk openly only to those you know you can trust.

It really is surprising what happens when a medium becomes disruptive in so many ways, good and bad, as blogging has become. We are seeing with blogs that perhaps more than with any other medium, people are openly and actively trying to deal with and understand issues in our world by communicating on the web. Individuals are trying to be involved in the news they read. That in itself is not a bad thing. But the use of this medium has to be tempered with some responsiblity and some understanding of the ramifications of taking part. And while I say that and believe it, at the same time I think we shouldn't feel like we need to limit what we can speak about. That's liberty and it's what the country I live in is supposedly based upon (idealogically anyway).

I empathize with anyone who has lost their job due to blogging. I find it a bit sad, however, that people need to worry about what they can say and publish on the web, unrelated to the company they work for. But that is the reality for us bloggers. I don't feel, however, like this threat to the image of blogging should change the way I currently write on the Internet in weblogs, forums, email discussion. I'm not a particularly influential person, so my blogging is perhaps trivial in the eyes of the company I work for. But, to some extent I do try to protect myself as much as possible and do more self-editing now than ever before when I put my fingers on the keyboard. I know my employer and colleagues can easily identify me here on my blog and in the other Internet conversations I participate in. In this new world where anything one says can be spread around the world so quickly, it's becoming more and more important I suppose to watch what you say on and off the record and to know who's listening.

This flurry of blog-related news has also made me a bit curious about how potential users/creators of business blogs will react. What I worry about as someone who evangelizes the value of enterprise blogging is the effect that the negative buzz may create with business decision makers. People who don't normally follow weblogs are now reading more and more about blogging in mainstream media (newspapers and magazines) and what they're seeing most these days is negative news related to weblogging. Will this create some negative reaction to blogs as a potential medium for communication?

It must be difficult for busy management staff to follow trends in the web technology industry and fully grasp an individual technology or medium. It is likely the case that many managers only get exposure to a trend once it gets printed in mainstream media. They may tend to latch on to a buzzword that appears in Fortune or a trend that shows up in Business 2.0. The fear, as Anil states is that people will start to call blogging "that things that gets you fired."

I haven't seen too many articles in the mainstream business media calling blogging bad for business, and hope that media writers continue to objectively report newsworthy incidents without attaching negative value to blogging as a medium. It's unfortunate that article titles like the one in CNN/Money (Have a blog, lose your job? Workers with Web logs are everywhere, and they're starting to make corporate America very nervous) are so sensational and give business managers and bloggers alike some pause. The article will lead you to believe that companies are organizing campaigns against their blogging employees. This really isn't the case in my opinion. At best, these companies are protecting proprietary information that is compromised by their blogging employees. At worst, they are dismissing employees for making bad decisions about how to blog on company time or on company premises.

I just hope that the isolated incidents with Rather and Jordan won't tarnish the image of blogs. But again, to quote Anil, no one ever gets fired for blogging. They sometimes get fired for having poor judgement. Blaming blogging seems to me like killing the messenger.