OCR Document

Like a growing number of employees, Peter Whitney decided to launch a blog on the Internet to chronicle his life, his friends and his job at a division of Wells Fargo.

Then he began taking jabs at a few people he worked with.

His blog at gravityspike.blogspot.com did find an audience: his bosses. In August 2004, the 27-year-old was fired from his job handling mail and the front desk, he says, after managers learned of his Web log, or blog.

His story is more than a cautionary tale. Delta Airlines, Google and other major companies are firing and discipline employees for what they say about work on their blogs, which are personal sites that often contain a mix of frank commentary, freewheeling opinions, and journaling.

And it's hardly just an issue for employees: Some major employers such as IBM are now passing first-of-a-kind employee blogging guidelines designed to avoid problems, such as online publishing of trade secrets, without stifling the kind of blogs that can also create valuable buzz about a company.

"Right now, it's too gray. There need to be clearer guidelines," says Whitney, who has found another job. "Some people go to a bar and complain about workers, I decided to do it online. Some people say I deserve what happened, but it was really harsh. It was unfair."

Wells Fargo declined to comment, but a spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the company doesn't have a blogging policy.

Blogs are proliferating as fast as computer viruses. According to a report this year by public relations firm Edelman and Intelliseek, a provider of business intelligence solutions, about 20,000 new blogs are created daily, and an estimated 10 million U.S. blogs will exist by the end of 2005.

More than 8 million adults in the United States have created blogs, according to two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit research center studying the Internet's social effects. And 32 million Americans are blog readers - a 58 percent jump in 2004.

Employers are just beginning to wake up to the potential risk that blogs pose.

"The law is trying to catch up with the technology," says Allison Hift, a telecommunications and technology lawyer in Miami. "This is like what we saw a few years ago with employers passing policies about e-mail. Now we're seeing it with Web logs."

The concerns are myriad. Employees who create blogs set up a direct way to communicate about their company with the public, because customers and clients can stumble across a blog. Bloggers may spill trademark or copyright material on their sites, they may post pictures of yet-to-be-released products and they may libel or slander another employee or a client.

A number of employment lawyers such as Hift and bloggers such as Whitney are urging companies to enact guidelines and communicate blogging rules to employees.

Stifling free speech?

But it's tricky. Some civil libertarians fear blogophobic companies may adopt policies that stifle the free exchange that has made blogs so popular.

"The concern is that it becomes a chilling effect," says Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties organization dealing with high-tech issues. "We don't want people to feel like ... they can't express their feelings."

Others argue that more explicit guidelines are needed.

"Companies probably need separate policies," says Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association.