This has been lying in my draft since a few days since I heard my friends case of blogging and getting caught for violating some of his company policies. One of my friend wrote some friendly article about someone and that person got a smoking fresh copy of blogging policy of the company and has properly implemented it with personal flavor of it. Now when some person catches you for violating a newly drafted blog policy, you can find the brilliance in execution. A guinea pig is used and learnings surely would go into the version 1.1 of that policy.
So some facts that I would like to mention for readers/bloggers' safety:
How do they come to know what you wrote?
Simple googling/your publicity of your blog or when they might want to get data to research on you.
How do they prove its you?
It can be any other Apurva Shukla in the world. But what I believe is that they can trace your IP from where you posted. In case you do not believe just see the site ticker at the bottom of my side bar, which I started using recently. It shows from where all your site has been accessed.
Is there a policy at all on blogging?
Every company might be having one in today's time. Since blogs are becoming slowly an active medium, companies wont mind spending some time into safeguarding their interests to come up with an internal law.
Whether there should be a company policy on blogging?
I feel yes and no.
Yes because there are a lot of things company specific which directly can get violated if you start talking on a public forum about that. That's plain easy understandable, something like an extension of the IP violation rule extension.
No for casual opinions about office life, person etc.
I think if there was any policy on restricted free speech then Scott Adams would be serving some 2000 years in prison for writing comical statements on office life. While I do agree that I would not go write something about my office on my blog, as blog is my personal space to talk of general issues but I am against any kind of policing on the blogging freedom. There are a hundred dozen blogs that want to become famous just by crying foul and attracting visitors to them but I feel there are more and more people who just want to hear plain facts (and little opinions based on them) rather than hearing false curses to anything. And if something is uttered about some person in particular without the context of company then it should be treated as out of context of office.
Interestingly today only Rashmi has blogged on the care that should be taken while blogging or expressing anything on the net. Read here.
My friend has recovered from the disaster but what's to be learnt from all this is that if you do not want such a jerk in your life due to a hobby or yours, please be careful about what you write.
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