Your Blog can cost you your job Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

There are many incidents of employers who fire employees for publishing on the web, either at-work on on their own hours.  Here are some scary facts:

The reasons for firing include misuse of company resources (internet connection), disclosure of company secrets, or defaming people or companies.  According to Bob Papaj in his book "You're Fired: The IT Manager Guide for Terminating "With Cause"", employees have no freedom of speech at work and no First Amendment rights, and you can be fired just for blogging, even if they don't disclose secrets or hurt anyone.

This low tolerance is largely because of the giant risk companies face from lawsuits.  This article notes that many ex-employees are surprised to get fired because their blog was anonymous:

"Last week brought yet another story about someone who just doesn't get it. A 33-year-old woman, British born but living in Paris, is suing her former employer, claiming she was unjustly fired because she was writing an Internet weblog (blog) about her workplace, among other subjects.

She wrote using a pseudonym and never identified her employer by name. But she did blog about love affairs, single motherhood and office bloopers and, not surprisingly, eventually her employer found out and she was terminated...

If you slag someone on the Net and can be identified, there will be some consequence...You may get away with acting irresponsibly for a while, but sooner or later, like the blogger at petiteanglaise.com discovered, it'll catch up with you and the consequences will probably be more trouble than the behavior was worth. That's life -- online and off."

Also, most folks think that as long as what they publish is true, they cannot be touched.  Wrong.  You can get sued (and also fired) for invasion of privacy if you publish embarrassing facts about a private person, even if it's true.

It's amazing what people will publish (allegedly under the guise of anonymity) that they would never say in public.  However, courts all over the world are allowing victims to force ISP's to disclose the identify of their attackers, so anonymity is an illusion.  I talk more about the illusion of anonymity in my book "Web Stalkers: Protect yourself from Internet Criminals & Psychopaths".