Blogger canned for criticizing employer

Well, it finally has happened in Britain: a disgruntled employee with a blog is fired for speaking his mind.

Funny thing is, his job was selling other people's opinions in funny little things called "books".

Another funny thing, probably nobody knew about the blog until he was fired. Now Joe Gordon and his employer, Waterstone's, both have an international degree of fame they did not have before.

Even though Joe offered to withdraw the comments and quit blogging, he was fired regardless.

Gordon's criticisms in his blog, or online diary, were read by a small community of fellow bloggers until he was fired and were re-printed in national newspapers and read aloud on national radio. Indeed, the last time he appeared on BBC Radio Scotland, before the recent publicity, it was in his capacity as "expert bookseller from Waterstone's" and now he's "sacked bookseller from Waterstone's". Waterstone's have declined to comment until after the appeal process is complete. --The Herald

I wonder if Waterstone's is perhaps a bit dismayed over all the negative publicity they have created for themselves. This brings up yet again a very good question: what right does an employer have to control what you say or do away from the job? Assuming what was said was true (mostly comments about not getting time off after Christmas), can an employer summarily fire you for stating an opinion? What if he made the same comments to a group of friends and was overheard?

My blog was something I ran for fun, for therapeutic value and because I enjoyed the fact I entertained some friends with it and made new friends via it. Small-scale and mostly read by friends and friends of friends and the occasional person who would come across it somehow - just another (darkly humorous) blog among many tens of thousands around the globe. Now it is being discussed for good or ill by a large number of people around the world - other bloggers, fellow booksellers (in and out of my former company), publishers, fellow reviewers and writers and even journalists. --Joe Gordon in his blog, the Woolamaloo Gazette

Can you trust blogs?

Here's an interesting question: now that blogs have gained some degree of influence, will we now start to see "black-blog ops" in the blogosphere? That is, deliberate disinformation from influential blogs.

It could be just a matter of time before some of the old-time bloggers start getting offered big bucks to take a particular side or slant a particular story. Or newer "mole" blogs that report fairly, get a following and reputation for fairness, and are then turned to some particular agenda.

Here is good comment on the possibility:

The personal voice in which even most anonymous blogs are written tends to inspire trust. But is that trust deserved? Sometimes, but not always. When Iraqi blogger Zeyad reported crimes by American troops I trusted him because he'd been reliable in the past, and now there's been a conviction in the case. His report could have been bogus, of course, with his earlier truthful posts merely a ruse to gain credibility, but I didn't think so, and apparently I was right. Track records matter. (Mitch Berg thinks you should look at bloggers' day jobs in assessing their credibility, though I'm not sure how much I agree with that.) Still, as Hugh Hewitt warns, "black blog ops," aimed at disinformation, are an inevitability and there are probably some going on right now. A while back, in the context of a much less significant effort to manipulate the blogosphere, I quoted scientist Thomas Ray, who once observed that "every successful system accumulates parasites." The blogosphere is successful enough now, and enough people have noticed that success, that it can expect to attract parasitism. --TCS

Six Apart to buy LiveJournal

I don't know why blogging should be any different than other businesses, but you just don't expect the kind of consolidation in the blog world that we have seen in the last year. It wasn't that long ago that Google bought Blogger from Pyra Labs. The latest move by a big player is the coming purchase of LiveJournal by Six Apart.

LiveJournal is one of the original big blogging platforms and has a reported base of 5.6 million blogs. TypePad, owned by Six Apart, has closer to 1 million.

With Microsoft trying to be a big player in the blogosphere and with Blogger holding most of the cards, it is not suprising that the other players are looking for ways to hang on to bigger shares of blogging customers.

The acquisition gives the San Mateo, Calif.-based Six Apart a major boost in the blog publishing business and a legitimate shot at staying relevant in the face of stiff competition from Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Motley Fool's blog discussion board

The Motley Fool added a blog discussion board to its site.

There is also an interesting article on Motley Fool about whether blogs are blooming or not. According to the article, 62% of the population has never even heard of blogs or blogging.

Bloggers are "People of the Year"

The latest issue of PC Magazine has named the founders of Blogger (Evan Williams, Meg Hourihan, and Paul Bausch) together with the founders of Six Apart (Mena G. Trott and Ben Trott) as People of the Year.

Although blogs have been around for awhile, PC Mag sees them as now being accepted into the mainstream:

Select bloggers were allowed the same access as traditional journalists at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, among them Patrick Belton at Oxblog.com and Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft.com, powered by blog tools Blogger and Movable Type, respectively.

One interesting tidbit in the article from Technorati: a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds, some 15,000 per day.

Reviews of MSN Spaces

Interesting review of MSN Spaces at Blogger Herald:

Rank: .5/10

"Whilst some are saying that Microsoft will help grow the market, which is possible, this service will do little to provide the current and future bloggers with anything other mass produced, standardised rubbish..."

And from Joe Blade:

"So, MSN Spaces. They're not ugly -- not Netscape ugly -- but they all look basically the same. They offer no subtlety, no grace, and very little in the way of customisation -- just near-identical blogs with near-identical feature sets, stamped out on a production line. I've seen several reviews criticising this, but I don't see it as a problem. Like Livejournal before it, I see MSN Spaces offering a valuable function -- hoovering up a significant proportion of crap from the web, and sticking it all in an easily-avoidable area."

Comment spamming hits MT

Comment spamming, which is an epidemic problem with WordPress blogs, has gotten to be a major issue with Movable Type as well.

Since inbound links are supposed to increase a site's popularity, some low-lifes have discovered that if they flood blog site commenting with hundreds of links, their own popularity rises. Online gambling sites are especially guilty of this tactic.

It has gotten so bad with many MT sites that the blogmasters have had no choice but to disable their commenting.

"Over the past two weeks, five hosts have in some way disabled MT or MT comments because of the server load they were creating," writes MT blogger Reid Stott. "Not five little Mom & Pop hosts - at least three of them I’d consider serious to top-notch hosts." Other bloggers also reported web hosts disabling MT scripts. One said their host, XO Communications, disabled MT after seeing 100 active connections to mt-comments.cgi, suspecting a denial of service attack was underway. Netcraft

Google Suggest beta

How cool is this? You start to type in a search term in the Google search window and a list of suggestions appears in a drop-down as you type. Next to each suggested site is the total hits for that site. As you type more, the list becomes more specific to your search words.

This is the new Google Suggest Beta. From their FAQ:

"That's pretty cool. How does it do that? Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history."

Not everyone is thrilled with the idea:

"Most of us receive our traffic from many dozens of keyword phrases - often time many hundreds or thousands. If this service would become popular you could find your traffic stunted as Google only shows a handful of terms. Many of those terms may not have occured to the searcher - and so they click them." --WebMaster

Audio and videos in blogs

Here's something we get asked pretty frequently: how can I post audio and/or video in my blogs?

Userplane has announce a free service for creating audio and video for blogs called AVBlogger.

"...the AV Blogger service automatically detects the presence of a webcam and microphone, making it easy for even non-technical users to create recordings of up to 10 minutes in length. The service displays a side-by-side record and playback interface, allowing users to compare old and new recordings. Each recording is streamed from Userplane servers, and can be copy-and-pasted into any web page."

Looks very interesting. To see a blog that is using the service, take a look at some of the links on their site. You will quickly see that things can be a bit slow or even buggy. In most cases, it looks like a problem with the way the feed is set up on the site, not with AVBlogger.

MSN Spaces to compete with Blogger

Microsoft is scheduled to unveil MSN Spaces as early as this week. Spaces is geared to compete directly with Google's Blogger blog platform and BlogSpot blog hosting.

Spaces has been up and running in a beta version in Japan since August. (Japan Spaces)

Some industry watchers have said they consider Microsoft's move into blogging as a counteroffensive against MSN archrival Google. In 2003, Google purchased Pyra Labs, the San Francisco-based vendor behind the Blogger blog-authoring platform. --MS Watch