A story that’s been posted on a couple of blogs today concerns an engineer at Friendster who comments on her blog that she was fired yesterday because she blogs.
In her post, Troutgirl (Joyce Parks) says “I worked really hard for that company, and I don’t think I have anything to be ashamed of.”
Reading through the blog posts she quotes as the reasons for her firing, it’s hard to see what she said that would cause the company to dismiss her. Of course, it’s impossible and inappropriate to make any judgements without knowing anything of the background. Nevertheless, something happened that caused such a violent reaction by her employer.
There’s a link from Troutgirl’s blog to that of her boyfriend Tim. In a post yesterday, Tim takes up a cudgel in defence of Troutgirl and attacks Friendster’s CEO: “Scott [Sassa] fired one of Friendster’s most respected engineers, for blogging about Friendster. Fired her, what’s more, for blogging in a generally positive and non-specific manner about Friendster. […] There were no warnings, no requests to remove the material, no other reasons mentioned.”
Without blogs, none of this would have seen the light of a global day and would likely have remained a private employer/employee matter. Blogs make the story a very public one. Potentially, this could develop into a public issue, one in which Friendster may suddenly find itself having to defend or comment on.
It will be interesting to see if or how this develops, and how Friendster deals with it.
(Via CorporateBloggingInfo and Corporate Engagement.)
UPDATE: Checking my latest RSS webfeeds, I see this story has also been reported on a number of other blogs, including Media Guerilla and PR Opinions.
Canned with a positive outcome you could say:
Joyce Park, view her pic on Red Herring ,
blogger ID Troutgirl, with a huge following,
was canned by Friendster, a blogging company, for…..blogging.
Duh, %&? you might be tempted to say. Not so fast. Now and then, the interactive media gets reverse-engineered in the worst sense of the word, by big, huge succesful TV execs who Bring Their Business Expertise to the Interactive Field. By sharks, whose world is one of one-way broadcasting, where dumb consumers can’t talk back and employees, *if they’re smart*, will say what they’re told. Two-way conversations in any way are an anathema to the foxy toxidity of general non-ecletic dishing out of news speak mentality.
Joyce Park is currently getting deluded with job offers.
Interactive is cool, Sharky.
Gisela Strauss
Technical Translator
Munich
http://bloggerati.blogspot.com
gisela.strauss@gmail.com
Gisela, those are interesting comments.
The only trouble as I see it, and which makes me reserve commenting on the right or wrong here, is that all that’s in the public domain right now is Troutgirl’s story – there’s been no comment from Friendster.
See my later post on this with a link to Troutgirl’s interview at Fast Company: http://nevon.typepad.com/nevon/2004/09/fired_friendste.html