This blog entry about “how do you blog about work” got me thinking.
If your boss caught you bitching about your job in a bar to a friend, would he care (assuming you weren’t telling him all about your company’s plan to offer a sheep raping service next month, that is, or something else fairly confidential).
If your boss caught you carving “${COMPANY} really sucks!” into a table at a dive bar, or spraypainting it on a bridge (not that blogging is equivalent to vandalism, but I’m thinking about the public nature of the statement here), or just standing up in the town square with a sign that said that, do you think he would care?
Of course.
Writing an online journal is an inherently public enterprise. When I was feeling like I needed a public place to vent about my job, I did the only sensible thing and registered a semi-anonymous account at livejournal and only told a few folks about it. Make yourself unidentifiable. And for god’s sake, don’t use the company name explicitly when you’re complaining in a public space about it. You would deserve to be fired.