weblogworld

15 February 2005 - Blogs and Jobs

CNN Money under : Have a Blog, Lose your Job? runs through it all again, using the Mark Jen and Elli Simonetti examples.

Anil Dash, yesterday, Non-Blogger Fired for Blogging

In this sense, Eason Jordan got fired for blogging. Except, of course, he's not a blogger. And nobody's ever been fired for blogging.

Quoting Rebecca Blood

It is a collision of expectations that is at the root of the whole incident.

As far as blog sackings are concerned, despite the well known Waterstone's case in the UK, it seems to me this is a cultural thing. The majority of blogsacks are Americans. Americans like to say, "Hi my name is John, I come from Delaware" when they meet you. They are open and friendly. But they have got the blog thing completely wrong. They can't see that it is a category shift to go from telling a complete stranger, on the street in Paris or London, their whole life story, including career progress and marital history, to divulging the same and/or their grievances about their work over worldwide medium.


These UK weblogger seem to have kept their jobs:

The Policeman's Blog everyday policing and other things besides

Random Acts of reality London Ambulanceman Tom Reynolds says:
All opinions on this website are mine alone, and may not reflect those of the L.A.S or other ambulance crews

• Blogging is a good vehicle for the whistleblower

It is surprising how much information people give away on their sites. Right at the beginning of my personal weblogging, I noted the surge of elation similar to that well-attested feeling when someone produces a piece of software that really works. Later doubts about quite what was behind the desire to blog and whether is was overall "A Good Thing". Human beings in genral are full of the desire for self-projection (the musician, artist, novelist, politician extreme exampes, requiring unbouded confidence and ego) and, let us be honest, a sense of powerlessness ordinary folk feel. Robert Creely, American poet, author of 1963 novel "Island":

A suspiciously simple sense of life is that it is in, in any one person conclusive... people try with an increasing despair to live, and to come to something, some place or person.

They want an island in which the world will be at last a place circumscribed by visible horizons.

posted by Adfero Affero @ Tuesday, February 15, 2005