.. Thx for
on january 28th, 2005, i was terminated from google. either directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason. this came as a great shock to me because two days ago we had looked at my blog and removed all inappropriate content – the comments on financial performance and future products. for my next entries, i was very cognizant of my blogging content, making sure to stay away from these topics. i mean, as much as i like to be open and honest about communicating to users and customers, i’m not insubordinate. if i was told to shut down this blog, i would have.
Find your target, dive in, do a little disclosure blog stunt by criticizing your employer in your personal blog, explode in a brilliant flash of publicity.
Then perhaps cash in with a a book deal like Washingtonienne or just use the publicity to your advantage in some other ways like Mr. Jen. See the feature story at Simplyfired.com
From what I can gather, his blog is obviously damaging to the company and I am not surprised that he got fired. Some of the other employees had probably complained about it as well:
I regret to inform you that Mark Jen was fired from Google on Friday, January 28th. I don’t have any details, but I can tell you that he was quietly let go. An e-mail was sent out to the entire company, letting us know that the matter many had written to management expressing their concerns about, had now been taken care of. I initially thought that this meant that Mark had been told to be more careful about discussing company financials, but it soon became apparent that Mark had left the company. I can only assume that his silence since that date means that they either threatened him or cut him a sweet severance deal. Whatever happened, it’s a sad day when you can’t speak openly about both the good and bad at your chosen place of work without getting silenced.
I think every country has had one or two of their own miniature “leaked through a blog” scandals by now.
I do appreciate free speech, but to me Mark Jen’s incident seems like a case of cash in Kamikaze blogging. I don’t think it was intentional, but after the fact he did squeeze every bit of publicity out of it that he could.
Posted by api in Stuff that doesn't matter