Can you be ‘dooced’?
In case you don’t remember the first employee who was fired because of her blogging activities, it happened in 2002 to Heather Armstrong who was a Web designer at this time. And as she was — and still is — blogging under the pseudonym of Dooce, ‘dooced’ became a synonym for getting into trouble because of comments found on a Web site. Four years later, NewsFactor Network publishes a long article about people who still ignore the rules of the Internet age and are overexposed in the blogosphere, putting their jobs — or their future careers — at risk. Read more…
Before going further, let’s look at Heather Armstrong. Here is a link to her story, written by herself.
Now, the NewsFactor Network article is a little bit too long to summarize. So I just selected the specific case of someone looking for a new job but didn’t know that what she wrote on her blog was public.
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When CollegeRecruiter.com was looking for student bloggers, chief executive Steve Rothberg got an application from a strong candidate who not only had a blog already, but also articulated her skills well in the cover letter. Rothberg was eager to interview her, but first popped onto her blog to see how she handled content. It turned out that she was handling a whole lot more than that.
“With one click, I got information about her sexual behavior that I really didn’t want to know,” he says. “There was no password protection, and it wasn’t like she had tried to hide her blog from me. She told me about it and gave me the link, like she was proud of it.”
When Rothberg rejected her application, he detailed his objections, noting that he would not want to risk having the candidate post inappropriate material to a professional blog. The blogger sent back a deeply apologetic note, writing that she had no idea that he would see that part of her blog, even though there was a clear link to the content right on the blog’s home page.
“She just had no realization that the things she posted for friends could be seen by other people,” says Rothberg. “She thought that whatever she wanted to be private would just magically be private because she wanted it to be. I think many people are going to find out that once you put something on the Internet, it’s public.”
As you’re reading this, I’m sure you know that everything being put on a Web site — or a blog — is public and can haunt you one day. But it seems that many people don’t know that yet.
Source: Elizabeth Millard, NewsFactor Network, May 30, 2006
