This is interesting (excerpted)

Fired For Blogging
NEW YORK, March 7, 2005

(AP) Flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and former Google employee Mark Jen have more in common than their love of blogging: They both got fired over it.

Simonetti had posted suggestive photographs of herself in uniform, while Jen speculated online about his employer's finances. In neither case were their bosses happy when they found out.

Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites or forwarding racist jokes, few of the policies directly cover blogs, or Web journals, particularly those written outside of work hours.

"There needs to be a dialogue going on between employers and employees," said Heather Armstrong, a Web designer fired for commenting on her blog about goings on at work. "There's this power of personal publishing, and there needs to be rules about what you can or cannot say about the workplace."

On blogs, which are by their very nature public forums, people often muse about their likes and dislikes — of family, of friends, of co-workers.

Currently, some 27 percent of online U.S. adults read blogs, and 7 percent pen them, according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project.

With search engines making it easy to find virtually anything anyone says in a blog these days, companies are taking notice — and taking action.

Last fall, Simonetti posted photographs of herself posing in a Delta Air Lines uniform inside a company airplane, her bra partly revealed in one. She was fired weeks later.

And in January, Jen was fired by Google over a blog that discussed life at the company, even though he said "it's all publicly available information and my personal thoughts and experiences."

Upon reflection, Jen said, he understood Google's concerns, given readers' tendencies to read between the lines and draw conclusions based on "random comments I made."

He said he hoped his case would prompt workers to "talk to their managers at length about blogging before they begin."

Simonetti said she still doesn't know what she did wrong, saying that plenty of employee Web sites and dating profiles identify Delta and include photos in uniform.

"If there is a policy against this, why weren't all these people punished before?" she said.

Delta and Google officials would only say that Simonetti and Jen no longer worked for them.

The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory or in retaliation for whistle-blowing or union organizing, labor experts say.

A few companies actually do encourage personal, unofficial blogs and have policies defining do's and don'ts for employees who post online. They recognize that there can be value in engaging customers through thoughtful blogs.