Here we are again. It seems that every couple of months this
meme rolls around, of bloggers having their employment dreams dashed
when their blogs are discovered. No one, it seems, if exempt; not
airline stewardesses, nor even employees of high tech companies
offering blogging services. The blogosphere is littered with stories of
people who got their walking papers once their bosses read their blogs.

But there's a new wrinkle to the story. Now it seems that your
blog content can keep you from even being considered
for some jobs. Even in academia now, what you blog -- not to mention that
you blog at all -- can cause a would-be employer to have second
thoughts. Ivan
Tribble relates how one academic search committee dove into
job applicants' blogs, only to learn more than they ever wanted to
know, and enough to make them wonder if hiring any
of the blogger candidates was a wise choice.

Job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road
ahead, if our committee's experience is any indication.
You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use
the faulty logic of the blogger, "Oh, no one will see it anyway." Don't
count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications
are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their
prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.
The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact
of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a
blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real
or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good
behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

In the article above, applicants either volunteered their blog
URLs or the search committee Googled thier names
and quickly stumbled upon the candidates' blogs. Either way, they were
found and read, as just about anything that's published on the web can
be. Once it out there, it's out there forver. Even if you don't
volunteer information about your blog, a potential employer can still
find it if they way, with just a few keystrokes.
Coming from the other side of the coin -- where blogging
actually helps one get a job -- the advice I'm
about to give might ring a bit hollow, but here goes. If you think
there's a possibility that blogging might come into conflict with a
current or future job,  think seriously about blogging
anonmously, at least in the beginning. If you don't believe me, take it
from a
well known blogger who at least started out anonymous.

I've been thinking about this quite a lot lately, and I have
some advice for new bloggers: do it anonymously, at
first at least.
There's
a distinction between private/public figure which isn't always
perfectly clear, but it's something that the internet totally destroys.
If you write something on the internet, it's public. A big blog links
to it, suddenly you go from 50 hits per day to 5000 in one day. 5 hours
later, CNN puts it on their "inside the blogs" segment, and suddenly
you've gone national to a non-blog reading audience who are perhaps
unaware of conventions of blogging.
I think that until you blog
for awhile it's hard to quite get a handle on how much you want to be
public versus being private, and how easily blogging and the internet
and the media can tear down that wall in a way you never expected.

While not everyone who starts a blog will likely become as
well known as Atrios, his advice is worth considering. The Electronic
Frontier Foundation has a good
guide to blogging anonymously, so it's possible for you to
blog to your hearts content and stay off the radar until you
decide to shed your anonymity.