Blogger sacked for sounding off

The Guardian reports:

A bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned bad days at work and satirised his 'sandal-wearing' boss. …

Mr Gordon, a senior bookseller who rarely mentioned work in his blog and did not directly identify his branch of Waterstone's, said he had offered to stop posting anything about his working life online when the company called a disciplinary meeting. According to his union, Waterstone's rejected his plea despite it not having any guidelines on whether its employees are allowed to keep weblogs.

"This wasn't a sustained attack," Mr Gordon told the Guardian. "I was not deliberately trying to harm the company. I was venting my spleen.

"This was moaning about not getting your birthday off or not getting on with your boss. I wasn't libelling anyone or giving away trade secrets." …

In the US, Ellen Simonetti was sacked from her job as a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines after her bosses saw pictures of her posing in her uniform on her website, which recounted the adventures of an anonymous flight attendant who worked for "Anonymous Airline".

I had mentioned the story about Ellen Simonetti when I first heard about it and established a Google Alert. Now whenever a related news story appears, I get a message from Google. I've been getting messages about this latest firing for the past few days. In fact, here are all the recent news reports. It's interesting to watch this ripple through the worldwide news sources.