Like a growing number of employees, Peter Whitney decided to launch a blog on the Internet to chronicle his life, his friends and his job at a division of Wells Fargo. Then he began taking jabs at a few people he worked with. His blog, gravityspike.blogspot.com, did find an audience: his bosses. In August 2004, the 27-year-old was fired from his job handling mail and the front desk, he says, after managers learned of his Web log, or blog. Read more of the story …

Just as a great website or blog can make you - as discussed in the previous post - writing the wrong stuff can get you in big trouble. The dilemma is this: your best writing is always on what you know best, and if that’s job-related, you’ve got a potential problem, interfering in corporate PR with your free-wheeling blog.

Although I occasionally write about stuff related to the pharmaceutical industry, I voluntarily refrain from any coverage on my employer (which isn’t even identified by name anywhere on this or affiliated sites). It’s a pragmatic approach taken by many of my colleagues, among them Derek Lowe at Corante’s In the Pipeline.