Actually, I don't think the situation is quite as grey as Whiteny would have us believe. Many companies have policies about Internet use -- although "no personal use" policies are probably far from universally enforced -- but about company matters is farily obviously a no-no.
He mentions me as a person who occasionally blogs about work, but he notes a couple of things about the way I do it, which bear further comment.
First, I never mention my company by name. This is not so much an effort to conceal a secret (really, it doesn't take much of an investigation to figure it out), but a personal policy of mine because I do not want anything I write here to be interpreted as any kind of statement by "an employee of Company X", as opposed to a statement by me. That's why I always refer to The Store and never to the company name.
Second, I never mention coworkers by name, pretty much for the reasons you'd expect. My coworkers are private people to the same degree that I am a private person, and if they want to be named online, it's not really my place to do it for them. Now, if any of my coworkers had blogs, I might link them if they interested me and so on, but I doubt I'd explicitly identify them as coworkers unless they agreed I could, and even then I might not do so. (I did slip once and mention a coworker by name in this space, but I redacted that part of that particular post a day or two later when I gave the matter more thought. It wasn't a bad mention, at all; in fact, it was a post about names and what they mean, and just a pure coincidence that I had a coworker with a particular name, but I wasn't comfortable even doing that much by way of mentioning his or her name. So that graf was cut.)
Third, I try to restrict my postings about what happens at work to things that could occur in any such business (i.e., not just at my particular Store but any such large retail establishment) and to those such things that I find amusing or illustrative in some way of more general habits of people. I never post about things that anger or frustrate me at work, and I never post about the internal goings-on with my company.
Fourth: I will not post anything that makes my company look bad. Now, I'll be perfectly frank here and state that in my estimation I've never had any cause to even consider doing so, but I will not allow that to happen in any event.
Now, these policies -- especially the third one -- might seem to have some wiggle room, so I basically trust my gut with it all.
On a somewhat related note, Atrios took a bit of time between open threads (maybe he just ought to open up a message board or some such thing) to offer this advice:
I've been thinking about this quite a lot lately, and I have some advice for new bloggers: do it anonymously, at first at least.
That's OK advice, but I had to laugh at this bit:
If you write something on the internet, it's public. A big blog links to it, suddenly you go from 50 hits per day to 5000 in one day. 5 hours later, CNN puts it on their "inside the blogs" segment, and suddenly you've gone national to a non-blog reading audience who are perhaps unaware of conventions of blogging.
Yeah, that happens all the time. Three and a half years and I've never been linked by Atrios (although a couple of months ago I was linked by a post on another blog that was linked by Atrios), not even when I sent him a tip on a very close Congressional race up here in Western New York that resulted in a Republican seat going Democratic. And I did exactly what Atrios suggests: I was strictly pseudonymous when I launched Byzantium's Shores, and only gradually abandoned that approach as it became more and more of a pain to maintain the facade of pseudonymity.
Yes, you might get linked by a big blog before you're ready for prime time. But the much greater likelihood -- vastly greater, I'd say -- is that you'll blog in obscurity for a very long time, even if you do it under your real name and blog about really unsavory stuff.
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