It's a blog's life

When I was thinking of the headline for today's entry I came up with a number of alternatives - "Man bites (or should that be "bytes"?) blog", "Raining cats and blogs", "Man's best friend is his blog", "The Chinese year of the blog" (or maybe that's been censored by the Thought Police), "Blog Day Afternoon".........This could go on and on, but life's too short.

Anyway, getting to the point...It was by chance that a certain periodical known as the London Law Review landed on my desk at work. It's normally the sort of thing I wouldn't give a second glance to with articles on such fascinating subjects as the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the interpretation of a will under Greek law. However one particular piece entitled "Blogging - Employment Implications" caught my eye. My curiousity got the better of me and I duly made a beeline for the back pages. Apparently an employee of the bookshop chain Waterstones got the sack for writing supposedly scurrilous things about them in his blog, referring to his manager as "Evil Boss". Ok, this isn't new news - it was reported over a year ago,
but it's the first I've heard of it and since I started the Dreaming Armadillo all those weeks ago (7 to be precise), I've started paying more attention to all the weird and wonderful things that go on in this strange otherwordly dimension known as the blogosphere.
His blog's called the Woolamaloo Gazette, and makes interesting reading. Letting off steam about a bad day at work during his own spare time is hardly a sackable offence, considering he made no direct references to any individual. His boss obviously couldn't take the flack. There are significant implications for employment law here, as the article in the London Law Review mentions. There's also a good argument for the setting up of a blogger's trade union to promote free speech. Apparently he's now working for a different bookseller...