Thanks Dad!

an interesting article forwarded to me by my Dad from the San Diego Union Tribune. as most of you know, i use the term "dooce" quite often and this article refers to it. i remember learning about it shortly after i started my blog. i make sure to teach my blogging friends about it and heed it's warning when i am posting on my blog.

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When blogs bite back

Judgment, freedom of speech square off in the workplace battle over venting on the Web

By Steve Johnson
UNION-TRIBUNE
November 14, 2005

The stories they tell are almost always the same:

I was just doing it to amuse my friends.

I didn't really think about the consequences of everyone in the world being able to see it.

I was entranced by this new technology.

But that's after the fact, after their blogging has cost them a job, a relationship or, at minimum, a lot of time spent explaining what they wrote.

As the number of blogs – online journals or "Web logs" – piles up, so, too, do the cautionary tales.

Postings in the digital realm can have repercussions in the real one. Blogs can bite.

Collectively, the tales scream what award-winning blogger Heather Armstrong learned the hard way: "You can write about work, absolutely. Go ahead and vent. But you're taking your livelihood into your hands."

That's what Armstrong, a 30-year-old Salt Lake City mom whose blog is dooce.com, says now, three years after being fired from a lucrative Web-design job. In calling her boss, among other juicy tidbits, "Her Wretchedness" and "the most insane person you have ever witnessed outside of 'Dateline NBC,' " she started down a path that led to unemployment and a brave new word.

Thanks to Armstrong, the Urban Dictionary, an online collection of user-defined slang terms, lists: "Dooced: to lose one's job because of one's Web site. Dude, I heard Janey got dooced last week."

The news of late is filled with more doocings or near-doocings, more people who failed to heed Armstrong's online advice, "BE YE NOT SO STUPID."

In August, the Automobile Club of Southern California dooced 27 workers from one of its San Diego offices for posting messages on a popular social-networking Web site.

The association, an affiliate of AAA, fired the employees after at least one worker complained to management about feeling harassed by the comments, which were written by employees on their own time at home, auto-club spokeswoman Carol Thorp said.

She said comments were made about other workers' weight and sexual orientation.

*to read more find this article on SignOnSanDiego.com