Blog at Your Own Risk

If irony is a drink best served on the rocks, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) might want to consider buying an ice machine. Yesterday the lockup period ended on 177 million shares held by insiders, six months after the company's successful debut. Deluge? Nope. The stock shot 3% higher. Then you have Mark Jen, an employee who was fired two weeks ago for running a weblog.

If you're missing the irony on that last point, it's that Google actually runs the popular Blogger.com site. By encouraging common netizens to open up and speak their minds while divulging their most intimate of details, Web logs have become wildly popular.

However, Jen -- who was not chronicling his rants and raves on Blogger.com -- was a little too forthcoming with criticism of his new employer. Hired back in January, he had no problem posting things going on at the company as well as comparing his compensation package at Google with that provided by his former employer, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT). Did he cross the line? Probably, but who knows where the lines are drawn exactly in the gray world of the Web?

Last year, a Delta (NYSE: DAL) flight attendant was canned for running a blog that featured photographs of the self-appointed Queen of Sky in her Delta uniform, posing onboard a Delta jet. She has filed a grievance with the company and renamed her musings. Diary of a Flight Attendant is now Diary of a Fired Flight Attendant -- the "i" in "Fired" is dotted with a sad face for emphasis.

The Internet offers an inviting platform to vent, but freedom of speech is not an absolute right. Bloggers must be careful even when writing about companies they don't work for -- Apple Computer (Nasdaq: AAPL) is going after a few non-employees for blogging about proprietary information.

Might the liability trickle all the way back up to the blog platform providers themselves? It's always possible. Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) is ramping up its AOL Journals blogging service for America Online subscribers, while Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) has helped individuals command an audience through its Groups offering for years. Just last week, Ask Jeeves (Nasdaq: ASKJ) agreed to acquire Bloglines.

The trend is booming, so it would be a tragedy to see blogs go away in a legal tussle. With strong voices in just about every industry pecking away in vital blogs, it would be everyone's loss -- and then Google would be left swirling a warm drink in its hand, wondering where the party went.

Before you buy the next round:

• Find out why Ask Jeeves went a-blogging.
• Ask yourself whether blogs are overrated.
• Share your thoughts in the Google discussion board.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz thinks that if Abe Lincoln were around today, he would have built a blog cabin. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.