So much for the power of blogging, but employees who are not careful on what they post on blog sites may end up losing their jobs if they are caught incidentally by their employers when they post something negative about their company and workplace.

Many would say, this is not something in the employee handbook, but then again, this can always be amended at anytime that companies and organizations would wish.

“If there is a negative impact on the organisation’s corporate image which is so serious that it breaches the implied term of mutual trust and confidence, the employee could be dismissed for gross misconduct,” she warned.

Cautioning employers to pay attention to worker’s blogs, Dowling added that blogs could provide evidence of other conduct issues, uncover workplace discrimination or bullying or even leak confidential financial information or new product details.

With the prospect of supremely cheesed off employees whistleblowing dodgy company practices, Dowling added that, “Employers need to ensure that they carefully consider the impact of blogging on their organisation and take appropriate steps to minimise any potential risk.”

Source: Digital Lifestyles. Blathering Work Bloggers Risk The Boot

[tags]blog news, blogger, problogger[/tags]

Blogging has been encouraged as a means of letting out clogged ideas in the mind of people but to date, most of the scattered ideas have become more of a nuisance rather than a helpful tool in the employee development of most companies. Such has been notable in the turnover rates of employees who find them looking for other jobs mainly because their employers are not to forgiving when they are able to read what they are sharing or hiding to express.

Some companies have gone to the extent of peeping into the personal journals and sometimes, these may bring back unlikely reactions. These reactions may be deemed as just cause for their termination, something that is clearly to watch out for on the part of the employees as a whole.

“A lot of people think they’re protected by the First Amendment in cases where they’re not,” said David Williams, a partner at law firm Morris James LLP in Wilmington, Del., and a past chairman of the employment and labor law section of the Delaware State Bar Association.

Union collective bargaining agreements and individual employment contracts generally say a worker can be fired only for what is known as “just cause.”

Yet, 92 percent of private-sector workers aren’t covered by collective bargaining, and employment contracts usually are limited to high-level executives.

Even though in Illinois, a company has the right to terminate an employee at will, one local attorney believes that without a policy in place, a worker should not be fired for speaking out on an outside-of-the-workplace issue.

“If there is no agreement, then in my opinion, you can say and do whatever you want,” said Al Williams, a Dixon attorney who specializes in workman’s compensation cases.

Broad statements on workplace free speech can be hard to make though, according to Williams, because company policies and situations can be so varied.

“It is very case-by-case and deal-by-deal, but an employer has to give a reason for firing you, they can’t just do it,” Williams said. – Let the bloggers beware: Companies’ rules may restrict what employees can and can’t say

[tags]blogger, problogger, employee rights, collective bargaining, CBA[/tags]

The best way to get proper testimonies towards how colleges run and safeguard their students is to allow them to blurt out what they want at their own manner of speaking. This is one of the recruitment strategies that colleges such as Ball State University has implemented, giving potential college students of the future an bird’s eye view of what to expect should they consider enrolling at the said university.

Bad and good experiences, the blogging phenomenon has allowed internal insights to set in. The best way to get to know colleges is through the students that are enrolled there. Hence, the blogs are being used as promotional tools at the university home page to have readers look over them initially so that they can relate to the experiences that students of today are truly witnessing.

Here is an excerpt from the Ball State University story:

COLUMBUS – Meet Michael Chandler, a college student who’s had it with parking tickets at Ball State University.

“I swear that’s where most of BSU’s money comes from,” Chandler groused on his blog. “They hand ’em out left and right, without a care in the world.”

Meet the sponsor of Chandler’s blog: Ball State University, which promotes the interactive online diary and several other unfiltered student blogs directly on the university home page as a recruiting tool for prospective students.

Colleges seeking a competitive edge are increasingly enlisting and sometimes paying student bloggers to chronicle their lives online. The results run the gamut from insightful to boring, but the goal is the same: to find a new way to win the attention of the MySpace generation.

“We found it a much freer, less constricting, far more believable way of letting prospective students glimpse what was going on on campus,” said Seth Allen, dean of admissions at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. – College recruiters turn to blogs

[tags]blog news, blog networks, college blogs, student blogs[/tags]

Finding no sense in continuing the ever flopping world of Yahoo photos, rumor has it that this portion of the search engine empire will be shutting down soon in favor of Flickr, a growingly popular photo image hosting site.

Yahoo photos was never really able to reach and achieve its goals. A lot of players entered the scene such as Flickr and sad to note that they had done much better as far as performance and preference is to be gauged. Hopefully, people would be aware of this soon since there are still people who use them and are totally unaware of the impending shutdown of the Yahoo Photo category.

The news is out (all over the place) that Yahoo is shutting down its stumbling Yahoo Photos site in favor of Flickr. But unless you’re read the tech blogs, you wouldn’t know it.

Here we are more than 12 hours after the news broke, and there’s no announcement on Yahoo Photos, Flickr’s news page, the Flickr blog or any Yahoo site. I’m a member of both photo services, and I haven’t received an e-mail or seen a blog post. What gives, Yahoo? Why are you keeping your users in the dark?

I don’t have many pictures in my Yahoo Photos account (I switched to Flickr long ago) but I do have some photos there. What’s going to happen to them? Am I going to have to migrate them to Flickr myself? More importantly, what steps is Yahoo going to take to ensure I don’t lose any photos in the migration?

Updated @ 3:19 PDT: Still no e-mail announcement, but Yahoo has posted migration instructions for Yahoo Photos users. See our post on the topic. – Hey, Yahoo—What’s Gonna Happen To My Photos?

[tags]yahoo photos, flickr, yahoo photos shutdown, yahoo photos migration, yahoo photos closure[/tags]

Twitter is the new way of being able to post messages and relaying them towards a selected number of friends through the use of mobile devices. Twitter is similar to posting anything a person would want but with a 140 character limit.

Not all people would be comfortable receiving messages that may be nonsense, but considering the advancement that people, particularly the younger generation, with regards to messaging is concerned, Twittering is tagged to be the next big thing in technology advancement in the mobile computing and instant messaging world.

“Essentially Twitter gives you the chance to publish your thoughts on the fly, or tune into the thoughts and information streams of other users from around the world.

The key to the success of Twitter is brevity – each message that you write can only be a maximum of 140 characters long. This has seen the rise of what has been called ‘micro-blogging’ or ‘micro-publishing’, with some users sending out tens or hundreds of messages a day to their friends, followers and the public.

Rather than a replacement for blogs as a publishing medium, Twitter offers an addition to the options available to you. While blog posts tend to be longer in form, Twitter posts are ideal for making single points or sharing a single piece of information, like a link, instantaneously. Think of the difference between an email and an SMS message, and you are in the right ballpark.

Messages can be accessed through the Twitter website – via personal or public pages – or through your favorite Instant Messenging tool or mobile phone. With the ability to follow the stream of messages created by any number of friends, Twitter allows you the chance to have an always-on stream of information wherever you go.” – Robin Good’s Sharewood Tidings

[tags]twitter, instant messaging, mobile computing, blogging, posting[/tags]

So the prophecy on technology advancement has been fulfilled in a way, but blogging was never seen to be something that was included in it. Sure, there will be the familiar phrase that businesses need technology…but with bounds of course.

Blogging has been something that has provided an overall view of what to expect today, but however, the freedom of speech in blogging has slowly made people getting out of sync that they end up getting into trouble rather than benefiting from it.

Such has been something that most companies have seen today, hence leading to people preferring technology breakthroughs but excluding the use of blogs. The blogs are getting out of hand and this can be seen by their power in controlling their superiors today rather then the other way around. Hence this alone is a conflict that is posing a threat towards establishing better ties rather than creating gaps.

“I will venture to suggest that most managers are afraid of blogs. Very few blog themselves and when they do, it runs through the marketing or PR departments. Managers in general still worry about loss of control with blogs. Letting their employees and consumers into the conversation and allowing them their say frightens them.
That’s a huge mistake. Check out Jeff Jarvis’ post about Dell. He and Dell got into quite a pushing match some time about his terrible experience with a Dell laptop. He triggered a major rehaul at Dell that included building blogs and consumer conversation sites that helped the company remake itself and its reputation.

The great challenge to companies these days is to learn how to let consumers in, how to open a conversation with them that is honest and real. It looks like lots of managers have yet to get that signal. Wait until they get their own Dell Hell.” [Corporations like Web 2.0 but Not Blogs. They’re Afraid of Their Own People.

[tags]blogs, blog news, online biz, online investment, technology, e-commerce[/tags]

All over the world, every nation has their share of the millions of bloggers that are spread everywhere. It has come to a point that legal reforms and intervention has become a need. But for Isaac Mao, the intent to assist the flourishing power or blogging and use it as a means for helping the country as a whole has been his vision.

Freedom of expression is obviously what blogs offer. But depending on the area of concern, blogs have been known to affect politics and sensitive issues in China, becoming a reason for them to clamp down a bit in allowing Chinese bloggers to watch what they express. But considering that ballooned rate of bloggers in China to 20.8 million bloggers to date.

It was spring 2002 when Isaac Mao, a Shanghai-based software engineer for US chipmaker Intel, first came across Internet blogs.

He was immediately struck by the freedom of expression the online journals offered ordinary citizens, and with a fellow blogger from a remote part of east China’s Fujian province he set up CNBlog.org, China’s first online discussion forum about blogging technology.

“We discussed how blogs may change China,” Mao said in an interview. “We didn’t imagine how this would make social and even political changes to the whole Chinese community in the next five years.”

In Communist Party-ruled China, the media—including the regular Internet—is tightly controlled by the government.

But blogs offer a means of dodging the censors, allowing more freedom of expression and, ultimately, freedom of thought.

“It’s only natural for human beings to express themselves and share their views. But the Chinese people have been repressed for so long and they have always kept silent. They couldn’t find an exit,” Mao said.

“They need this tool to give them the freedom to express themselves. Blogs can be a very empowering tool to them,” he said. – The Raw Story

[tags]bloggers, probloggers, politics, revenue[/tags]

Earlier this week Gawker Media’s Valleywag took some shots at Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny:

Could the father of podcasting (one of so many—it takes a village) and famed Yahoo blogger be related to Kevin Covais, the bookish little American Idol star nicknamed “Chicken Little” (because “Harry Potter” is so 2004)?

Jeremy apparantly didn’t like it and fired back today:

Seriously… While I admire your attempt, you really do need to try harder. A quick survey of friends and co-workers found that most weren’t terribly amused. I also wasn’t amused. But more importantly, you didn’t even come close to offending me.

You call yourself a “tech gossip rag?”

I think we’re all really hoping for something that’s more like a cross between the Weekly World News and The Onion.

And yes, it’s a slow news day…

Be sure to wear.. flowers in your hair…

I’ll be in San Francisco Sunday through Tuesday afternoon. Anyone up for a cold beverage and some blog chatter? Hit me up at matt [at] blogmedia [dot] biz.

Forbes Magazine has a good article about how Corporate America should be tapping into the Blogosphere.

My favorite quote from it:

“To get noticed by bloggers, companies should appoint internal bloggers and start them blogging,” said Wyman. “Of course, the blogs must be authentic. Also, companies can sponsor blogging events and meet the bloggers themselves to see what makes them tick.”

If any companies want to sponsor a few events in New York they can flip me an email.

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