(no subject)

Russia is in the news again. Can I trade terrorist acts for doping scandals? Pretty please?

I read an interesting article today.

Friendster, known for breaking new ground in online social networking and promoting self-expression among peers, fired one of its employees Monday for her personal Web log, or online diary. Joyce Park, a Web developer living in Sunnyvale, Calif., said her managers told her Monday that she stepped over the line with her blog, Troutgirl. They declined to elaborate, except to say that it was CEO Scott Sassa's ultimate decision, Park said.
http://news.com.com/2102-1038_3-5331835.html?tag=st.util.print#yourtake

The best part though is the comments. They diverge in three main direction:

This person should know better than talk about her employer in her blog.

This company should know better than that – it would ruin their publicity, especially since they are promoting self-expression, etc.

They probably just were looking for a pretext to fire this person, since the job she was hired to do was done.

I was trying to make up my own mind on it – and I strangely find all these options bearing some weight. I like the third most, but do we really know what happened there? Anyway, now it seemed to generate much more noise than the management expected.


Also I remember reading somewhere – may be on the same site, that many company encourage blogs of their employees, believing that it gives the company “a human face”. But isn’t it a stretch to think that people wouldn’t talk about their work? Or that they would give their posts to pre-approval to PR department? I mean I understand also that any company want to control the information about itself that goes public. But shouldn’t there be clear rules?