The blogosphere has been slightly abuzz with the story of new Google employee Mark Jen being axed. Just use Technorati or Feedster to find bloggers talking about this story.

Why does this matter? Because Microsoft has Robert Scoble and over a thousand others blogging about their job and what they do. Yahoo! has the often outspoken and sometimes brazen Jeremy Zawodny. Is this a sign that Google is afraid of transparency in their operation? Is Google starting to turn … [gasp] evil?

Here’s the short of it: Mark Jen blogged about what it was like being hired by Google, complained about the pay (complaining how it was below industry average) and other very specific things about his job at Google. About five or six days later, his blog mysteriously disappeared from the web and the blogger conspiracy theorists we’re out calling Google “evil” for the cover-up. It seemed like Google wasn’t living up to their corporate mantra: Don’t Be Evil. However, a couple days later Mark’s blog came back with an apology from him about what he had written on his blog being unacceptable and he had edited the prior entries to be more politically correct. Sites like Bloglines, however, kept a cache of the original offending entries and people started linking to that. A couple weeks later the rumour started anew that now Mark Jen had been fired by Google. Today Jeremy Zawodny posted he spoke to Mark and confirmed it:

First off, nothing Mark said surprised me. Yes, he was fired from Google. It was directly related to his blog. He was employed there for just a couple of weeks.

Jeremy goes on to discusses the current Yahoo! position on blogging:

Aside for the normal agreements that one signs as a Yahoo employee, we have no additional policies or rules about blogging. But we’re working on something: a set of guidelines that are very much in line with those used by Sun Microstems. The idea is to let all employess know that it’s okay to blog about life at Yahoo, as long as you’re smart about it.

So was what Google did evil, or were they legitimately reprimanding an employee who wasn’t being “smart about it [blogging about his job]?” IMO, it was the latter, but as you can tell from this blog entry, I’m going completely off the words of others, I have no empirical evidence either way. More importantly, I think this is something we’ll continue to see happening until these major companies develop an official blogging policy. Once enough of these stories are out, it will be like being fired for surfing pr0n on the job. Imagine that, you get hired at a company and get the employee handbook and they start talking about smoking areas, breaks, internet surfing habits and … blogging!

Other blogger opinions
Other bloggers talking about the Mark Jen situation (to be listed as I come across them):

• John Battelle pinged a Google rep who confirmed the termination, and John ponders: “Is this such a clear case of violatoin to merit firing?”
• Nicole Simon’s podcast: “Mark Jen fired - but Google is not Microsoft and Mark Jen is not Scoble”
• Nathan Weinberg from BlogNewsChannel regrets following the Mark Jen story so closely: “Sadly, I wouldn’t be much of a reporter or a blogger if I ignored it, but I just wish Mark hadn’t lost his job over it.”
• Gregg at neurobashing compares this to the Apple/Think Secret lawsuit: “Apple needs to take heed of this. Don’t rely on tradition, culture, and the threat of a lawsuit to keep things quiet. Either compartmentalize and investigate - run your company like the CIA - or just accept that things are going to leak.”
• The Papal Bull has a list of 12 supposedly fired for blogging bloggers including: Michael Hanscom, Troutgirl, Mathhew Brown, Penny Cholmondeley, Ian Murray, Steve Olafson, Daniel P. Finney, Jessica Cutler, Heather B. Armstrong, Amy Burch, QueenofSky.
• Secular Blasphemy: “Based on some of the comments, I’d say that if the postings on the blog was not the direct cause of being fired (which I hope it wasn’t), the comments themselves tell us something about this particular employee that is not very attractive…”
• Jape thinks “Blogging is dangerous!”
• Roland from blogworkers looks at the situation internationally: “There are many legal differences about job protection between the U.S. and Europe, but even in France, I bet Jen would also have been fired.”

Did this post make you go hmm?

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