Don’t Get Dooced
“Dooced,” according to the Urban Dictionary, means to lose one’s job (get fired) due to posting on a website or blog. The Chicago Tribune refers to the term in an article titled, “Blogs Can Bite.”
As a guest barista here, I have to guard my writing–for the good of IABC, me, and the company that actually pays my salary. I write during non-work hours, which sometimes means lunchtime or late at night. Althought the Trib’s article focused more on people who lost jobs due to what they wrote, I don’t want to jeapordize my position because of when I write.
That article was one of two of interest to online communicators. The other, “You’ve Got Mail Trouble,” focuses on how email has become a liability to many companies and their executives. Although the topic of email security and disclosure has been well-covered in recent years–thanks to Enron, Arthur Andersen, Boeing and others–the Trib article offers a couple of interesting links. The first is to “The Internet Archive,” an online repository for web pages. The second is to the new comments@whitehouse.gov, which replaces the former president@whitehouse.gov mailbox. The difference with the comments@ email is that the White House will respond via snail-mail. The purpose is to improve tracking and to help tame the flow of up to 300,000 emails per week that the White House received.
A few IABC colleagues have told me recently that they don’t comment on the Cafe or other blogs because they don’t want to “get burned” by employers or other IABC members. Blog posts and comments can come back to haunt the authors, but I have received too much value from reading other people’s thoughts to stop contributing solely on the potential for trouble. The Cafe has provided us with some very interesting and informative discussions that would not have taken place if no one had started the conversations.