Blog warnings: A blog — your personal Web page journal — is a fairly new way of keeping a record of your activities, expressing your innermost thoughts and exchanging information with your cyberspace readers.
Having the ability to speak freely is one of the major attractions of blogging and one of the reasons it continues to grow in popularity.
But if you are an employee of any organization, large or small, you may not have all the freedom you think you have.
Especially if you’reablogger.
And that caveat applies even if your blog is conducted entirely outside of work — on your own PC rather than your employer’s.
Where blogging may get you into trouble with your bosses is if you mention anything at all about what goes on at work, positive or negative.
Michael Karpeles, a labor lawyer representing management, offers this warning about blogging that I urge all employed bloggers to study carefully:
‘‘Employees should not believe that they can blog about the company anonymously or on their own time and avoid employer discipline or termination,’’ said Karpeles, a partner at the law firm Goldberg Kohn Bell Black Rosenbloom & Moritz.
The Chicago-based attorney says that employers are concerned about ‘‘company confidential information and company loyalty when considering employee blogging.’’
Something very wise that employees should consider doing, according to Karpeles, is to consult ‘‘company policies regarding communications to others about the company.’’
And he adds this chilling caveat: ‘‘The 1st Amendment does not generally apply to private employers.’’
