Bloggers: Use caution

AUSTIN, Texas--Laina Dawes and Elaine Liner are pretty sure they were fired for blogging. It's not 100 percent certain, of course, because no one ever told them so officially, but the evidence seems solid.

Dawes, who used to work in a Toronto law firm, and Liner, who was an adjunct professor at Southern Methodists University, were two of the panelists for "We got naked, now what" at the South by Southwest conference here Saturday.

The talk was a frank discussion of how bloggers who write about both their personal and private lives can navigate the waters of honesty and disclosure and still remain employed.

Thus, Dawes and Liner were the poster children on display for what can go wrong, even when bloggers attempt to discuss issues in their lives and related to their jobs under the cover of anonymity, as both had done.

One lesson: people can figure out who you are, even if you think you're being clever and writing under a pseudonym. That's what happened to Dawes and Liner, as both said their bosses somehow discovered their identities as they wrote about race issues and criticisms of SMU, respectively.

The idea then is that bloggers should be awful circumspect when they post their innermost thoughts in a forum that is open to the world. It's a shame in a world where the Internet is supposed to be a tool for spreading democracy and free speech that people can't say what they want without fear of retribution, but it shouldn't be a surprise.

After all, getting Dooced--being fired for blogging, so named for the first famous fired blogger, Heather Armstrong, known as Dooce--is no longer a rarity.

What was interesting was a turn of the conversation in which the panelists pondered the future, when today's teenagers are in the workforce. That could pose a problem to traditional dynamics of employer/employee relationships, in large part because today's kids have basically no interest in self-censorship. And why should they, the argument goes: The Internet is their world, and it's what they know. So employers may just have to deal with them being open about whatever is on their mind, be it about work, or their personal lives.

But not today. No, today, employees would be wise to know that if they are critical about their jobs, their bosses, their former employers or anyone, or write about aspects of their personal lives that they wouldn't want their employers to know about, then maybe they shouldn't hit that "submit" button. Because word gets around. Like it or not.