What is the saying: loose lips sink ships? I’m clearly in the minority on this recent Joyce Park AKA troutgirl firing from Friendster because she blogged about her job apparently without a disclaimer or advance permission. I think she should have gotten permission to be doing PR, because she seems to have been hired to do coding, not PR. The media and all too many bloggers that I’ve read today seem to be running with Friendster being the Dark Side because they fired a good employee “for blogging” Please, isn’t it possible that it has more to do with talking about internal company business without permission? Almost all the Microsoft bloggers I’ve seen carry disclaimers about what they say. This includes Scoble who was also somewhat critical over this move:

And, along that vein, I’d never fire someone for blogging. I’d make sure there were at least three other reasons for firing first. Why? Because if you fire someone for blogging you just guarantee that you’ll make them a martyr and you’ll do horrid damage to your brand.

This isn’t about employees blogging, this is about employer-employee confidentiality and common sense. Perhaps Friendster is indeed the bad guy here but I haven’t seen any official word from Friendster except that they don’t talk about employee terminations (ZDNet article). So here we have one side taking the high, professional road and the other side stirring a hornet’s nest with some very passionate, outspoken bloggers like Jeremy Zawodny. I notice that Jeremy doesn’t have a disclaimer either and he also teeters on the edge, IMO, with talking about some of Yahoo’s business, but it is possible that he has enough clout with them not to get fired and Joyce AKA Troutgirl didn’t with Frienster. It’s somewhat ironic in fact that he starts his post off with “No, not me. (But would it surprise you?)” — and no, Jeremy, it wouldn’t surprise me if Yahoo axed you over comments made on your blog.

I’m probably wrong but it seems to me that if this troutgirl had simply in advance cleared this PR with her superiors and/or included some sort of disclaimer, she could have avoided being fired. Or even if she was fired she have a great wrongful termination suit at her disposal. Also, was she compensated for these articles that she wrote about her experience with Friendster? Could this maybe have had something to do with her firing? Was she working on this instead of doing the coding work they paid her to do? I think there are far more questions than answers to simply write this story off as “fired for blogging” and that’s it. Many of those who think like employees are going to cry at the injustice without all the facts and those who think like employers are going to be left pondering the text of their NDAs with their counsel.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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