Someone may find this a useful idea: EFF: How To Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else). This article will tell you how to blog incognito. It also covers some of the subjects that you can blog about in particular states and not be fired for your opinions.

I can see that blogging about certain subjects, people, and organizations can be personally dangerous and career-limiting. The posting points out that you lose privacy when you make your name available. Furthermore, you may upset family members, or you may upset your employer and get yourself fired.

On the other hand, blogging non-anonymously shows courage and lends credibility to your writing. For me, it is against my ethical principals to blog with no name. Blogging with a real name is limiting. I often weigh what I blog about and how to word it so that I don’t hurt someone. Remember “minimize harm” from the A Bloggers’ Code of Ethics? Sometimes I go out on a limb—what seems like a limb to me—and agonize over my postings afterwards. But it is out there and too late.

It is also too late for me to be private. I am already burned into Internet bytes as far back as my first postings to USENET technical groups in 1989. I used to weave and my list of Web sites for weavers was one of the early lists and was accessed often and still has a number of linkers. I am not giving away anything here. Any librarian knows how to research and track people on the Internet. Of course, that is the point of EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Think about what you are posting anywhere, not just your Web log. It may come back to haunt you in five or ten years. In 1989, or even 2000, when I first set up programmingpeers.com to play with Web technology—which I cannot do at work because Unix system administration, not Web development, is my job—I did not realize that my experiments would be stored on the Internet long after I deleted them. I was amazed to discover my early homepages were saved to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

A non-anonymous blog may get you hired too. In this CareerJournal article, Where the Jobs Are: Librarians Break Into Strategic Roles (April 20, 2005), Laura Stevens mentions that Steven Cohen got his new job because a “company employee had seen his blog on trends in the library field (librarystuff.net).”

The EFF posting has a link to a list of known fired bloggers, Morpheme Tales: Statistics on Fired Bloggers, as of December 2004. There is also a link to The Bloggers’ Rights Blog, which has a list of people who have signed this bill of rights and a small list of Blogophobic companies—Google? I notice that Microsoft has been removed as Blogophobic.

[EFF posting via Librarians’ Index to the Internet - lii.org weekly news update.]