Jeremy Zawodny recently wrote a pretty good summary about employee blogging. A few people have asked me why I haven’t blogged more about working at Yahoo!, and what it is that I do there. Basically, I always follow these basic criteria when I blog about work:

• Is it about anything sensitive in any way?
• Is it disrespectful to either your employer or any coworkers?
• Would you flinch in the slightest if your boss, his boss, all the way up to the CEO and the board of directors read it?

Does that leave you with anything? Is what you have left interesting? No, I mean interesting to other people. Yes, that’s what I thought. You’re not left with much.

Hey, it sucks that Mark Jen got fired from Google, but it looks like he pretty consistently violated my three rules above, and apparently posted something that in itself pushed it over the top, since he was forced to remove it. There’s a huge difference between writing an occasional blog about your employer (as Jeremy Zawodny often does, and is fine!) and blogging about your employer as though the whole exercise of working there was a documentary writing project.

Let’s move on, guys!