By Ross Farr

I don’t blog. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, “blog” is short for “weblog.” It’s also used as a verb, much like “to journal” is.

A blog is an online journal or log in which “bloggers” post for the entire world (or “blogosphere”) whatever information they want. Blogs can include stream-of-consciousness ramblings, bad poetry, photos, political commentary, wickedly funny accounts of the blogger’s own life and even musings on blogging itself.1

Sometimes it seems as though I am the only person who doesn’t have one. To the uninitiated, the whole phenomenon can seem overwhelming. (Some people I know still think dictation machines are pretty neat.) Personally, the self-referential spin of blogging, let alone blogging about blogging, makes me a little dizzy.

But this existential dizziness isn’t why I don’t blog. My reasons are practical -- I don’t want to get fired. One of the blogosphere’s favorite topics is bloggers who get fired because of the content of their blogs. Just search “fired for blogging” on Google for a taste of this.

One well-known example is Heather Armstrong, who was one of the first well-publicized bloggers to get fired because of her blog, www.dooce.com. Armstrong posted witty, sarcastic stories about her job and co-workers and was fired because of it.2 Getting fired for blogging is now known in some circles as getting “dooced.”3

As Armstrong probably was, I am an at-will employee. This means I can be fired for any non-discriminatory reason or no reason at all. Even if I don’t blog on company time or with company resources, I could give my employer an excuse to let me go by posting a witty anecdote that puts my boss or the company in a bad light. The same charming story I may get away with telling a friend over dinner becomes a public broadcast when I post it on a blog.

Some employers are beginning to enact policies specific to employee blogging. You can find comparisons of corporate blogging policies purporting to be those of IBM, Yahoo!, Plaxo and others at http://www.corporate blogging.info/2005/06/policies-compared-todays-corporate.asp.

Common elements of these policies include reminders that employee-bloggers are personally responsible for their blogs. Some require bloggers to post statements making clear that the employee’s opinions are not that of the company.

Plaxo’s purported policy is exceptionally generous. It allows blogging on company time and even provides that employees “may respectfully disagree with company actions, policies, or management.” This policy also warns that employees “may not attack personally fellow employees, authors, customers, vendors, or shareholders.”4 Most of these policies remind employees to abide by existing company rules, keep company secrets and follow the law.

This makes me worry that blogging could subject me to liability, in addition to jeopardizing my job. Unlike standard journalism, most blogs are not subject to an editorial process that requires fact-checking before publishing or any sort of substantive critique. The legal perils associated with blogging include liability for defamation and copyright, trademark and trade secret violations.

All it may take to violate another’s intellectual property rights would be cutting-and-pasting material from another source or not attributing a quote. These are common practices in e-mail among friends, but once posted on a blog, they could attract unwanted legal attention. In my case, because I’m a lawyer, if I were careless about clients’ secrets or confidences, I could violate RPC 1.6.

Defamation only requires negligently publicizing an untrue statement concerning a private individual, which damages that person’s reputation. I am not aware of any case of a blogger being held liable for defamation, but it is a possibility. Of course, I would never intentionally defame anyone or mention confidential company information while I type away on what I think of as my “private” online diary. How careless would that be?

Consider the case of Mark Jen, who used to work for Google. According to an article in the online magazine, Gelf Magazine,5 Jen started a blog shortly after joining Google and intended it for only “his girlfriend and a few others to read -- he posted a link to it in his America Online user profile, but never got more than a hundred hits per post.”6

He wrote about adjusting to his new job at Google and his impressions of internal company policies, comparing them to those at Microsoft, where he had just come from. His blog was soon picked up by bigger blogs with an interest in the inner workings of Google. In no time at all, the online buzz about Jen’s blog caught the attention of Google and he was eventually fired.

For the curious, the following Web site purports to contain some of Jen’s offending postings: http://files.geek life.com/photos/ninetyninezeros/. These postings include alleged details about Google’s benefits package, its relocation reimbursement policy, compensation and profitability -- all seemingly mundane information to share with your friends or family, but potentially sensitive, if not confidential, information to publish to the world, including competitors.

I can imagine Google’s position: Even if there was not actually competitively damaging information on Jen’s blog, how could the company trust him to keep real secrets safe? I have not read all of Jen’s blog postings, but I bet he probably didn’t defame anyone. I don’t know whether Jen disclosed trade secrets. In any event, his tale is a cautionary one about the disconnection between what many believe to be a semi-private communication and the very public realm of the Internet.

I understand that most bloggers probably will not get fired for their blogs and I don’t know of any bloggers who have been sued. However, I like my job and the people I work with. I think I’ll continue to resist the temptation to blog about them.

1 For an explanation of blogging, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog.

2 To read Ms. Armstrong’s account of being fired, go to http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/ 02_26_2002.html.

3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dooce.

4 Id.; http://blog.plaxoed.com/?p=41.

5 http://www.gelfmagazine.com/mt/archives/ interview_with_fired_google_blogger.html.