Parting Words

I have a friend, Stacy, who was a roommate of mine in college. We both left the school after our freshman year and ended up going in different directions. I went back to Arizona and she went up to Oregon. We wrote letters for a few years, but eventually they were fewer and fewer until we didn't write at all. E-mails were sporadic and they, too, eventually stopped.

Earlier this year, I did a search for her husband's name because I knew that he had a website. When I found it, I discovered they were both keeping a blog. They both post to the same blog and sometimes make comments in each other's entries. Because of their blog, I was able to find out what had been going on in their lives and to contact Stacy. We have been e-mailing each other since.

This is what blogs do. They keep people connected. They're a way for people to keep a record of their lives so that they will remember what happened years later. People are able to keep in contact with friends and family they rarely get to see, or as in our case, people they've lost touch with.

Blogs inform, entertain, and connect people. They allow regular people to be heard by thousands of others. Some invite argument and discussion; some are just for fun; others are creative and inspiring. But all these sites have one thing in common: they allow everyone to have a voice by being an unrestrained and open forum. Blogs will continue to be a part of the Internet and will continue to expand in their uses. There will never be a better tool for letting people open up and affect the world around them.

Blogs and the Workplace

Journalists are not the only ones who need to worry about their jobs if they're keeping a blog. People in all sorts of occupations need to be concerned about what they say in their blogs because if word gets out at work that you've said some things about your company or co-workers, you could get yourself fired.

Heather Hamiltion who runs dooce.com was fired from her job because of comments she made about her job and her co-workers. Although she never used any names and never said where she was working, her employer felt it was inappropriate for her to be keeping a blog where she ridiculed her workplace. This discussion took place on Metafilter shortly after it was discovered she was fired.

The discussion brings up interesting points. Should your employer be able to fire you because of what you write in your blog? It is a valid question because blogs are public sites, and yet they are personal writings. If you were to post something nasty about your co-workers in your cubicle, you would most certainly get in trouble. But if you post something nasty about your co-workers on a site where you may not identify yourself or the people you are talking about, should that be cause for dismissal?

Another, even more difficult, aspect of blogs and the workplace to try to figure out is should you be fired for personal beliefs or experiences? Mark Pilgrim of Dive into Mark was fired because he wrote this. (To read more about this check out his archive where he details what happened.) Are people not allowed to talk about private things on a blog because their bosses might be embarrassed by what they have to say? If that is the case, then what are people supposed to talk about on their blogs?

This is a difficult area to discuss because it brings up many issues. There are those who would argue that privacy rights and freedom of speech should come before the rights of employers to hire and fire those they want. But what about employers' rights? Should they not be allowed to present a particular image of their company to the public; should they not be allowed to hire and keep the kinds of people who would shape and maintain that image? This is a tricky area and there are sure to be lawsuits in the coming years as more people get fired over their blogs. For the time being, people need to be aware of what is going on and make sure they keep tight-lipped about what's going on at work.

Blogs and the Media

It's not surprising then, that since September 11th, more and more journalists have been keeping blogs for the news sources they work for. MSNBC currently has seven of their correspondents keeping blogs.

Many of these types of journalistic blogs written for a newspaper's online site or an online news source are generally along the lines of opinion columns. It is uncommon that reporters keep blogs as a part of their job, but there is debate about whether or not that should be allowed. Steve Outing from Editor and Publisher believes they should keep blogs. However, Mickey Kaus, from Slate, worries that "reporters will start to put their best stuff into blogs" in order to avoid their editors (NY Times).

Another important aspect to consider is journalists keeping personal blogs. When it was discovered that Steve Olafson, a reporter for The Houston Chronicle, was keeping a weblog in which he discussed local politicians and his newspaper, he was fired from his job ( NY Times).

So should journalists be able to air their own views on their own sites without consent of their editors? This is something that newspaper publishers will need to look into; new policies may needed to reflect the blog phenomenon.