The little-known blogs were created by Susan Kaplow, whose title is director of syndication and development and who works under vp of editorial operations Rick Levine and editorial director Tom Wallace.

Launched in the fall of 2007, the network's three bare-bones sites are fueled by a tiny staff and network of freelancers. The sites have an independent, informal look and feel; Product Fiend is a skincare site offering news and tips under headings like Lip Schtick and Zit Zapper. Elastic Waist is devoted to weight-related obsessions, and the third, Daily Bedpost, is a sex blog. They were originally billed as being separate from the company's magazines, but all three display prominently links to Conde Nast's Glamour, Allure and Self. A copyright line identifies the blogs as being part of Conde Nast.

"This blog network was a valued experiment," Kaplow wrote in an email supplied by a company spokesperson. "It was growing and doing well at syndication but we can no longer continue to support it in this environment."

"There was no conflict of interest between my writing for Kissing Suzy Kolber and my work for The Washington Post. The blog is not a journalistic endeavor and it is not something I was paid for until I revealed my identity. It is a humor blog about the NFL, whereas my job for the paper was to cover local news in a suburban county outside Washington, D.C. It is beat that has nothing to do with a professional football league.

"I also find it troubling that I was summarily fired for engaging in something that is core to the spirit of The Washington Post: full disclosure. Even if editors had a problem with the language used in the blog, they should have been able to respect that my goal was not to defame The Post, but to be forthcoming with my readers."

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

Let's put a little perspective on this blogging thing. You could be getting shot at in Iraq. You could be a single mom working three jobs to stay afloat (Happy Birthday mom). You could work in a coal mine. You could be in a life and death battle with Leukemia. You could be doing any one of thousands of high-stress jobs. Sure, the Web has a lot of stress but let's get real: If you're stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you'd be stressed by any profession you chose.

Step Two: Start Blogging and Wait to Be Discovered

After college, Cody left her native Chicago for the romantic Twin Cities -- trading Post-it Notes for pasties while exploring the frosty Minneapolis underworld as a stripper. She described the perils of pole-dancing on the popular Pussy Ranch blog.

Because there are only a few blogs online these days (Technorati currently tracks a mere 112 million), it was a safe bet that a successful Los Angeles literary manager (Mason Novick) would find Cody's work and inquire from 3,000 miles away about her literary ambitions.

"Before Mason found me, all I'd written was the blogs for City Pages in Minneapolis," Cody said. "He asked me if I'd thought about writing something else. I started my book after that."

However, before we could add photos to the site, we had to give considerable thought to the best way to integrate photos into a professional site. Privacy is an incredibly important issue to us, and we wanted to make sure we had the right controls in place. As a result, all members will have the option to control whether their photo is visible to their connections, their network, or everyone.

We know that people take their professional reputations seriously, and as a result we expect LinkedIn profile photos to be professional in nature. However, we also hope that the wisdom of the millions of LinkedIn users will help us identify photos that violate that. Similar to LinkedIn Answers, members will be able to quickly and easily flag photos that violate policy for review.

Zenner's page-inexcusablebehavior.spaces.live.com, which she refers to as her "daily mental vomit"—is essentially an online diary. She rambles about lunches with friends, smoking, old movies, and boob jobs. Zenner's former job as a technical recruiter at Nintendo-although she's technically a contract employee through Parker Services-was not directly referenced on her site. She also mentions several of her coworkers, although not by name, which is what Zenner thinks got her fired.

One post on Zenner's blog—titled "The Daily Weed"-begins with her disputing her friends' perception that she is a pothead. She digresses into a wry tirade against one of her bosses: "One plus about working with [a] hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy [woman] is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily," Zenner writes. "My gut tells me that this woman hasn't been fucked in years."

"We get a lot of calls from people who have been accused of defamation when they're blogging anonymously," says Rebecca Jeschke, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "In most cases, these charges of defamation are pretty weak. There's a very strong tradition of anonymous speech in America and it's protected in the First Amendment."

Nintendo of America's Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs Perrin Kaplan stated that blogging was not banned by the company but "we generally don't encourage them. [Zenner] was expressly discouraged from doing what she did. I've seen everything that she's written and it's really not work appropriate."

Office Snapshots shows you the inside of the offices you care about. This will generally be from Web/Tech companies, and perhaps larger companies that people will be familiar with.

Nearly ten percent of companies have fired an employee for violating corporate blogging or message board policies, and 19 percent have disciplined an employee for the same infractions, according to a new survey from Proofpoint, a messaging security company.

Almost a third of companies "employ staff to read or otherwise analyze outbound email," while more than fifteen percent have hired people whose primary function is to spy on outgoing corporate email. A quarter have fired an employee for violating corporate email policies. Twenty percent of the companies and almost thirty percent of companies with more than 20,000 employees had been ordered by a court or a regulator to turn over employee emails.

Losing your job can be devastating. But we, your colleagues at The Chronicle, hope to make it a little less devastating.

The goal of this blog is to share information that will help your transition. For those who lost their job, you might want to provide your contact info so we can reach you (either by posting a comment or sending us an e-mail). This also could be the place for you to ask for help, be it on a personal or professional level.

For those still at The Chronicle, maybe there's something you want to offer, be it job leads, career resources, or simply a friendly voice.

For starters, we in multimedia want to offer you whatever help we can. If you plan to seek a job in journalism, chances are that you're going to be asked about your multimedia expertise. Whether you're a veteran multimedia journalist or someone who still isn't clear on what a podcast is, please feel free to contact us by email or cell. Think of us as your multimedia consultants (minus, of course, any fee).

The blog also warns angry current or ex-employees to leave their critical comments off the site, noting "...the tone of this blog...is to support one another. No doubt there are plenty of people who are angry about this situation -- we ask that you choose another venue to express those feelings. Thanks in advance."

More than a third of UK bloggers risk the sack by posting derogatory or damaging details about their workplace, boss or colleagues, a survey claims.

Human resources company Croner, which commissioned the study, warned that such bloggers could be sacked from their job for gross misconduct.

Croner surveyed 2,000 people who keep a personal internet blog or diary and 39% said that they made harmful comments.

Bloggers should consider the potential impact of all postings, Croner said.

Ryan Loken, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. recruitment manager, says he spends one to two hours a week searching through blogs for new talent or additional information about the candidates he has interviewed. "Blogs are a tool in the tool kit," he says. Since he joined the Bentonville, Ark., retail giant three years ago, Mr. Logen estimates that Web journals have helped him fill 125 corporate jobs. Most of the recruits were referred to him by bloggers and blog contributors, and some were the writers themselves.

In addition to blogs that focus on their industry or field of interest, recruiters say they check candidates' blogs about noncareer-related topics for evidence of writing skills and clues to how well rounded they are.

Most blog-related recruits are professionals in technology and media because jobs in these fields often require knowledge of the blogosphere, says Kirsten Dixson, a founding partner at Brandego LLC, a career-management firm in Exeter, N.H., that specializes in personal branding.

In June, Brian Balfour's blog, SocialDegree.com, inspired an unsolicited offer for a product-manager job from an executive at Zoom Information Inc. "I was impressed by the points Brian was making and the way he was making them," says Russell Glass, vice president of products and marketing at the Waltham, Mass., technology company. The blog also offered details about Mr. Balfour's work history and education. "It was a no-brainer to give him a call and see if he'd be interested," Mr. Glass says.

I don't have a great deal to say at this moment other than to state the bleeding obvious that we are hugely excited about how we can use the cash to develop Shiny.

We started Shiny with nothing other than some great ideas and a passionate belief in the potential of blogs. We now attract almost three million readers each month to our 22 sites, employ over thirty bloggers (some full-time, some freelance) and regularly attract big name advertisers.

We have come a very long way in a short space of time with no money. The investment will help us make some of more ambitious dreams realities.

Defamation Claims. Defamation claims represent a growing threat to employers as a result of the increased popularity of employee maintained blogs. To the same extent that an employer may be liable for defamatory publications of its employees, an employer may also be liable for an employee's defamatory private blog on topics that fall within the scope of the employee's employment or within the employee's actual or apparent authority. Even if an employee's statements are outside the scope of employment, an employer may find itself named as a defendant in a defamation suit if the blogging employee is the supervisor of the defamed individual or the employee's blog references the employer. The chance that an innocent employer may be a defendant in the latter situation is increased because bloggers often blog anonymously, leaving the employer as the only readily identifiable potential source of the defamatory blog.

Harassment Claims. An employer may also be subject to liability for sexual harassment and hostile work environment claims based on an employee's private blogging activities, if a supervisor authors inappropriate comments about an employee or if the employer had knowledge that an employee authored harassing blogs about a co-employee. For example, in Blakey v. Continental Airlines, a pilot filed a hostile work environment claim against Continental Airlines arising out of derogatory comments posted about her on a pilots' electronic bulletin board operated by a third-party service provider. The court held that Continental Airlines has a duty to take effective measures to stop co-employee harassment when it knows or has reason to know that such harassment is part of a pattern of harassment taking place in settings related to the workplace. The Blakey decision confirms that employer liability may extend beyond mere employer-provided blogs.

Economic Damages to Employers. An employer's business itself may be harmed by defamatory comments on employee blogs. Employees may use blogs as a means to anonymously defame employers, supervisors, or other employees which may harm employee morale, result in a loss of good will with patrons, or damage the employer's public image. In the late 1990s, for example, Southern Pacific Funding Corporation filed for bankruptcy after its stock prices fell from a high of $17 to $1 - a spiral triggered by blog postings claiming that company executives were covering up multi-million dollar embezzlement, exaggerating economic forecasts and putting the company up for sale.

Disclosure of Confidential Information. Blogging activities may also result in the unauthorized release of company information and data into the public domain. Whether published by a disgruntled employee or a loyal yet naive worker, a blog that discusses an employer's confidential, business or financial information may have far-reaching and harmful consequences for the employer, such as the dissemination of trade secrets. Similarly, the unwanted release of business or financial information may result in securities law violations, such as unlawful release of inappropriate information in advance of an initial public offering.

Susi Weaser's big break came after 'Something for the Weekend' makers, Princess Productions, spotted her potential through a series of short video blogs or vlogs she presented on the blog Shiny Shiny, a girl's guide to gadgets on the Shiny Media network, and TechDigest.tv.

Mike Worsley, of Princess Productions, said: "We screentested her after coming across the YouTube clips. She's a natural, which comes from her background working in social media and being very interactive with an audience."

YouTube, a service for users to upload, view and share videoclips, has been responsible for the rapid success of bands such as OK Go.

Weaser added: "I never imagined just doing online videos would lead to an actual TV presenter's job. But fans needn't worry because I'll still be doing my regular 'vlogs' for TechDigest.tv and ShinyShiny.tv as well."

Mr. Vayner's curious celebrity came after an 11-page cover letter and resume as well as an elaborate video that he had submitted to the Swiss bank giant UBS showed up on two blogs, and then quickly spread on the Internet. The clip, staged to look like a job interview, is spliced with shots of Mr. Vayner lifting weights and ballroom dancing and has him spouting Zen-like inspirational messages.

The video clip flooded e-mail inboxes across Wall Street and eventually appeared on the video-sharing site YouTube.

***

Mr. Vayner's seven-minute clip, entitled "Impossible is nothing," presents images of him bench-pressing what a caption suggests is 495 pounds and firing off what is purported to be a 140-mile-an-hour tennis serve.

The job materials that were leaked and posted for public view included detailed information about him that allowed strangers to scrutinize and harass him, he said. His e-mail inbox quickly filled up, with most of the messages deriding him and, in some cases, threatening him.

Mr. Vayner's experience shows the not-so-friendly side of the social-networking phenomenon. While sites such as YouTube allow aspiring comedians or filmmakers to share their creations with millions of others, they also provide the ideal forum for embarrassing someone on a global scale. Materials can quickly make the rounds on blogs, via e-mail and through online hangouts like MySpace, becoming all but impossible to contain.

Despite the mockery that the video has inspired, he still speaks proudly of his athleticism. Nearly all the feats in the video are his, he said, and they are real. But he says he is not certain that the skiing segment actually shows him.

For some, it would be unthinkable – certain social suicide. But Gabe Henderson is finding freedom in a recent decision: He canceled his MySpace account.

No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he had accumulated were really just acquaintances.

He's also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and share photos - all with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends.

"The superficial emptiness clouded the excitement I had once felt," Mr. Henderson wrote in a column in the student newspaper at Iowa State University, where he studies history. "It seems we have lost, to some degree, that special depth that true friendship entails."

Though he's not anti-technology, Dr. Bugeja often lectures students about "interpersonal intelligence" - knowing when, where and for what purpose technology is most appropriate.

He points out the students he's seen walking across campus, holding hands with significant others while talking on cellphones to someone else. He's also observed them in coffee shops, surrounded by people, but staring instead at a computer screen.

"True friends," he tells them, "need to learn when to stop blogging and go across campus to help a friend."

Steve Miller, a sophomore at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., joined Facebook as a way to meet people, but also quickly learned that it had limitations, too.

"I discovered, after meeting many of these [online] friends, that a good Facebook profile could make even the most boring person somewhat interesting," says Mr. Miller.

"Text messaging has become the easy way out," Mr. Miller says.

He's had friends cancel a night out with a text message to avoid having to explain. He's also seen some people ask for dates via text to escape the humiliation of hearing a "no" on the phone or in person.

"Our generation needs to get over this fear of confrontation and rejection," he says.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin found itself the subject of a video on YouTube, a site that lets users post amateur videos. One of its engineers, Michael De Kort, posted a video in which he claimed some patrol boats the company had delivered were defective.

He says he posted the video after getting no response to his concerns from the company. After the video went up, De Kort, of Monument, Colo., says, he was let go. He is now seeking to create a new online website where employee whistle-blowers can post similar videos.

"Now, today, everyone can have a James Bond camera. Like blogging before it, online photo and video sites beg for corporations to produce new standards and rules that are clearly communicated to all employees," says David Carpe, founder of Boston-based consulting firm Clew. "It's a risk."

Employees also run a personal risk if they post untrue information that could leave them vulnerable to defamation lawsuits. Videos can also give information to competitors or create a public relations crisis.

The concern is mounting with the growing popularity of image-ready phones, Web cameras and online sites that allow users to post video.

YouTube, Bankrate.com (RATE), eHarmony, and Gawker are on a list of candidates for buyouts shown by an investment banker at a presentation to the Online Publishers Association this morning.

Tolman Geffs, managing director of Jordan, Edmiston Group, said the number of deals for online consumer media companies has nearly doubled in the last three months. There have been 91 in the last nine months compared to 47 in the three previous quarters.

Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, doesn't believe there's really been a big rush of VC money or Big Media interest in blog publishing. He told me Gawker's blogs would cease doing what they do best if they were bought by a mainstream media company.

"Put the Gawker titles in a media conglomerate and they would spontaneously combust," Denton said via e-mail. "Imagine, for instance, how AOL Time Warner would handle the X-rated party photos in yesterday's Fleshbot, or a snide report on Defamer about the latest dross from Warner Brothers, or Gawker's borderline libelous mockery of [Time Warner CEO] Dick Parsons. Without media conglomerates as targets, the Gawker titles would have no purpose. Gawker is not for sale but it is, more importantly, and in a deeper sense, unacquirable.

The blog will follow Jimmy's adventures as he continues to battle with the elements in one of the UK's most dangerous occupations. Jimmy, who is the skipper of the Amity II, sails out of Peterhead. He runs a successful business - founded in 2005 - which aims to supply langoustines fresh or frozen direct to the UK and European market. Only the best fresh langoustines from the last day of fishing, selected by Jimmy himself, are exported, with the rest being sold as frozen.

The Blue Toon skipper, who has more than 30 years experience of fishing, has been a fisherman since he left school in 1976. In 1986 he bought his first boat, and his wife called her Amity which means 'friendly'. In 2004 he was awarded the Pride in Seafood industry award for his upbeat attitude and high-quality product. He has just been accredited as a member of the Responsible Fishing Scheme which formally recognises fishing practices.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by Yahoo! through my website. At first I just thought it was another piece of spam, but out of curiousity I replied to the email. Sure enough, the response I got did not contain a spoofed email header and seemed to be legit. Yahoo! wanted to let me know about a new internship opening. After several phone calls, dozens of emails and a pile of paper work, everything has worked out. This Friday I will be heading to Sunnyvale, California to work for Yahoo! as a Blogger Intern. I can’t exactly say what I’ll be doing yet, but I’ll be sure to give you guys the link to whatever I’m working on over there. As for what’s going to happen on this front, I will still be blogging here with the time that I find after work. But until I find my bearings, posting here might be erratic at best.

For Mr. McDonald, the Web log he created, "I'm a Comedy Central Intern," was merely a way to keep his friends apprised of his activities and to practice his humor writing. For Comedy Central, it was a corporate no-no — especially after it was mentioned on Gawker.com, the gossip Web site, attracting thousands of new readers.

"Not even a newborn puppy on a pink cloud is as cute as a secret work blog!" chirped Gawker, giddily providing the link to its audience.

But Comedy Central disagreed, asking him to change the name (He did, to "I'm an Intern in New York") and to stop revealing how its brand of comedic sausage is stuffed.

"They said they figured something like this would happen eventually because blogs had become so popular," said Mr. McDonald, now 23, who kept his internship. "It caught them off guard. They didn't really like that."

So Hoffman, then 23, poured out her frustration -- under the pen name EA Spouse -- in a November 2004 blog that resonated so strongly with other video game developers that it helped spark an employee uprising inside EA and several of six lawsuits for unpaid overtime against three of the industry's most prominent employers.

Hoffman wrote on her blog that EA's attitude toward its workers was: ``If they don't want to sacrifice their lives and their health and their talent so that a multibillion-dollar corporation can continue its Godzilla-stomp through the game industry, they can work someplace else.''

Now, more than a year later, game developers have won settlements in three class-action lawsuits alleging EA created exhausting work schedules without paying overtime, and successfully pressed employers to ease unrelenting workloads. And EA Spouse, whose true identity has been cloaked until now, is becoming a voice against America's culture of overwork.

``We had received so many excuses, and they had done so much overtime and everyone was so tired,'' Hoffman said. She told her fiance, ``I need to write something about this. It's not right.''

Blog editor: I blog, you blog, we all blog apparently, judging from the proliferation of blogs in the past two years. The success of influential ones like Wonkette.com has companies wanting in on the perceived edginess of the blogosphere.

"Blogging" is not only starting to creep into people's job descriptions, but recruiters are starting to see blog-related job listings.

One on Monster.com seeks a blog editor "to manage and moderate blogs for clients and to write for the company blog on PR and new media topics."

Employers regularly Google prospective employees to learn more about them. Blogging gives you a way to control what employers see, because Google's system works in such a way that blogs that are heavily networked with others come up high in Google searches.

And coming up high is good: ''People who are more visible and have a reputation and stand for something do better than people who are invisible," says Catherine Kaputa, branding consultant and author of ''Blogging for Business Success."

But pick your topics carefully and have a purpose. "The most interesting blogs are focused and have a certain attitude," says van Allen. "You need to have a guiding philosophy that you stick to. You cannot one minute pontificate on large issues of the world and the next minute be like, 'My dog died.' "

This number includes blog readers who applied through JobsBlog and were later hired ... Their JobsBlog application is not necessarily the reason they were hired. (The successful attempt could have been, again, a Monster.com posting, a friend who is an employee, a cold call from a recruiter, etc.) It also only includes people who applied through the blog, so if you read and loved the blog and got hired - but didn't apply through us, you wouldn't be included in this total.

What I do know is this ... Each of these 137 did, at some point in their candidate lifecycle, apply through the blog, and therefore, we can assume they also read our posts and utilized our tips!

Bloggers
Pay someone to write snarky comments? Do you think we're getting paid for this?

Employers, bankers, insurance brokers, and college admissions officers are becoming wise by using social networking and blogging sites as an addition to traditional background checks, such as credit and criminal history.

The more than 70 million people using these sites make it easy for anyone who wants to learn about them.

"Unfortunately, I think most of the people who are posting those are only thinking about their intended readers," said Steven Rothberg, president and founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, the highest traffic career site used by students, recent graduates, and employers.

"If you're a 20-year-old college student and you like to get drunk on the weekends, you're probably going to put that on your profile because you want to hook up with other people that do the same."

Pennsylvania State University police used Facebook to identify 50 students who stormed the field after the football game against Ohio State this past season.

Naively, the students formed a Facebook group that university police said was titled something like "I stormed the field after Ohio State game."

Police officers were searching for another student who was accused of online harassment when they stumbled upon the group, complete with university e-mails and pictures that clearly incriminated the students.

Punishments for the students ranged from warnings to suspensions.

Search engines make it possible for employers to scour all manner of digital dirt to vet employees. Online profile company Ziggs.com CEO Tim DeMello fired an intern after he discovered that on the intern's Facebook profile he divulged that while at Ziggs he would "spend most of my days screwing around on IM and talking to my friends and getting paid for it."

Schools are warning parents about Google's danger to the MySpace generation, for whom the Internet functions as a virtual diary-meets-barstool confessional. Adolescents try on identities and new behaviors like sweaters. Only now they are trying them on in front of the world. A Pew Research survey found that more than half of all online teenagers are ripping, mixing, and burning their own content, usually placing their creations right alongside their names and photos. The teenagers on the "companies and co-workers" section of MySpace who are talking smack about employers like Blockbuster (BBI), Target (TGT), and Gap (GPS) are clearly unaware of the implications. "People need to realize that this is like putting stuff up on the 6 o'clock news," says employment lawyer Garry G. Mathiason, a partner at San Francisco's Littler Mendelson. "Once you've opened the drapes, people can see everything. They can see your past life."

That's why Dave Fonseca, a senior at the University of Massachusetts, pulled his Facebook profile down in December. "Employers are looking at these things," he says. (It's easy for people to get passwords and noodle around on the site.) Fonseca even knows the verb for people who get fired for what they put on their Web sites: "dooced." The name comes from Dooce.com, the blog of Heather B. Armstrong, who got canned after writing about her job on her blog. Even Friendster, a social networking site that thrives on getting people to reveal everything about themselves, has been insistent on old-school discretion in-house. The company terminated esteemed engineer Joyce Park 18 months ago for mentioning Friendster on her blog, Troutgirl. The rumor on the Web was that the offending entry referred to Friendster's earlier sluggish performance. But the info was already widely known.

She was fired, she writes, for blogging about co-workers.

Now, after her firing led to a slang term for being canned for blogging --"Dooced" -- she offers these words of wisdom: "My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID. Never write about work on the Internet unless your boss knows and sanctions the fact that YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT WORK ON THE INTERNET."

Have you noticed that it's been awhile since we last heard about a company firing an employee blogger? The Technorati and Indeed.com data appears to back this hypothesis up.

My gut is that there has been a decrease in blogger firings because a) the ensuing publicity is terrible, b) more companies have a tolerance for bloggers and c) they may be hiring bloggers instead. I don't feel it necessarily reflects that more organizations have blog policies in place - although they should.

"A few months ago when I decided to return to school, I realized this meant having no steady income, incurring high tuition fees and purchasing expensive textbooks - something which I did not like the sound of. In order to finance my education, I started to find other ways to make money without working a full-time job. This included investing in the stock market, selling goods and services on eBay, and creating popular websites. I created a journal of all these efforts at www.cwire.org which has become much more popular than ever expected," he said.

I'm not going to be asking for contributions again. Part of it has to do with the reasons outlined at the bottom of this post. I haven't grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org...those things just aren't interesting to me.

The other big reason is that my life has changed a lot in the past year. Growing a new business with a novel (or at least challenging) business model requires lots of time and energy to build the necessary momentum...basically approaching it with a startup mentality: long hours, work on the weekends, less time to spend with family and friends, making work the #1 priority, etc. My (unstated) intention from the beginning was to approach the site as a startup, but along the way life intervened (in a good way) and I couldn't focus on it as much as I wanted to. The site became a normal job, a 9-to-5 affair, which meant that I could keep up with it, but growth was hard to come by.

Unlike western bloggers who often focus on news and politics, the Chinese white collar bloggers see complaining alongside office and personal gossip as their priorities, according to the survey.

According to the findings of a blogging survey conducted by CBP among white-collar workers in China's four largest cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen - 52% responded they already had a blog, while another 28% said they plan to begin a blog in the near future.

"Weblogs have become the fourth online channel for Chinese people to communicate with each other, following email, bulletin board systems (BBS) and instant messaging tools such as QQ and MSN Messenger," Bian Bingbin, President and Chief Career Consultant with CBP Career Consultants, told Interfax Monday. "Blogging is now a lifestyle habit for more and more Chinese white-collar workers, with a majority updating their blogs once every three days on average," he said.

She's got plenty of digital snapshots showing New York drivers giving her the single finger salute.

Plaut writes that one guy gave her $140 for a fare of just $4.10. Click here to find out more!

Her passengers have included a stripper going on date to see the play "Wicked."

One passenger even came to Plaut's rescue, by letting her make an emergency bathroom stop at a Brooklyn home.

So the Associated Press did an article about me, and the result has been a whirlwind of attention. To be honest, it's all a little overwhelming, but I figure I'll just enjoy it while it lasts. So this morning I agreed to be interviewed by Kemberly Richardson (pictured above) for ABC News, and, though I was nervous, it turned out to be a lot of fun. The segment should appear on either Wednesday or Thursday during the 5:00 p.m. broadcast. I'm only now beginning to wrap my brain around all this, it's just so utterly surreal, but it has certainly made the past few days interesting, to say the least.

Blogging – The increased use of collaboration tools, such as blogging, also increases the possibility of leaking confidential business data.

When it comes to blogging in your office, lawyer Mike Oliver has a basic premise: Don't point and click too fast.

"If you're the employee and you're upset because you didn't get a raise or you're not getting along with your boss, the inclination now is to post your unhappiness on a blog," said Oliver, who has taught cyberspace law at the University of Maryland and is formulating a blogging policy for his nearly 40 technology-based clients. "But I find this highly dangerous for the employee."

When the Internet came of age in the mid-1990s, the first problem employees encountered was with e-mail, when some workers who circulated messages with incriminating information were fired.

Now blogging is a new source of employer-employee trouble. Typically blogs, short for "Web logs," are opinionated and personal posts on the Internet. They can take on a diary-type form and often feature frequent updates.

Thousands of academics are bloggers, keeping online journals on everything from their strides in research to travel escapades and political rants. Many say what happened at DeVry, a private, for-profit university, wouldn't happen at traditional public universities that foster critical thinking and robust debate protected by the First Amendment.

Still, some professors have been asked to tone down their blogs and others - especially those without tenure - say they censure themselves to protect their students or employment.

"The self-censorship, the chilling effect - I know it exists because people talk about it online," said Sam Smith, a blogger who taught journalism last year at St. Bonaventure University in New York.

"There may be things that they could say that would cost them tenure," he said. "In the academic world, this shouldn't ever be an issue. In reality, that's not always the case."

Welcome to our new blog, The Way We Work, a place we hope you'll visit often for reports and comments on career and workplace issues.

For the past 10 years I've written about career/workplace issues for Newsday. Before that I was an editor at McCall's magazine. Before that I was an editor at the American Banker newspaper. And before that, I was a middle school English teacher. So, I'm also a career changer.

But just like any new fad, interest wanes and less people blog until the blogging becomes almost nonexistent. Now marketing is left scratching their heads because they have a built an infrastructure and spent a good deal of money and now they are in desperate need of content. This is where I introduce to you the ghost blogger and the ghost blogger service -- passionate writing and informed content for hire.

The ghost blogger headhunter may get involved or a specific ghost blogger will get hired at this point. The writer's job will be to post eight to 12 blogs per week on the company's corporate Web site. These writers can get paid $1,000 to $5,000 a month, depending on the traffic they generate.

For example, if a blogger is paid a base of $2,400 per month, she could receive an additional amount of money based on the amount of traffic she brings to the site. If the average traffic is 100,000 page views, she could get a bonus if it goes up to 110,000, 120,000, 150,000 or 200,000 page views and so on. The more buzz produced, the more money earned.

The right to blog: People who like to blog -- especially about their employer -- should refrain from doing so at work.

"The computer system is the property of the employer, and the employer has the right to monitor all internet activity," said Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute. "That would include blog posts and all e-mail and internet transmissions."

Flynn estimates that hundreds of people have been fired for their blog content in recent years. In the AMA/ePolicy survey, 26 percent of respondents said they had fired workers for misusing the internet. A quarter of employers also said they'd terminated workers for e-mail misuse.

Cervantes used the social network Internet service to create his own profile, where he blogged details about his life as a professional boxer in Ventura, Calif. The blogs would also drift into other topics, including dilemmas with girls and the latest hangouts. He also used his page to showcase his graphic artwork and pictures of his friends.

And that, said Cervantes, was what got him in trouble.

Cervantes was let go last month from his part-time job as a trainer at La Colonia Boxing Club after the city received an anonymous letter from a parent complaining about the contents of the Web site. The Oxnard, Calif., Recreation and Community Services Department runs the club.

"In this time of the exponential growth of blogs, there are CBS News employees who are creating and maintaining personal blogs. Before any such blog is created, the SVP of Standards must be informed and must approve the blog. For those of you who are already in the blogosphere, you must contact the SVP of Standards. There can be no messages or information posted on these blogs that is potentially damaging to CBS News if made public."

Robert Mason (not his real name) would love to spend a few minutes during lunch catching up on blog posts from around the web, but his company doesn't allow it. The financial institution where Mason works as a vice president has security filters set up to block access to -- among other things -- any website that contains the phrase "blog" in the URL.

What's more, says Mason, such practices are becoming prevalent in corporate America, particularly in financial services. Mason sits on a roundtable privacy group of 20 of the country's largest banks. "My best understanding is that my company's anti-blog stance is the industry norm," he says.

Keith Crosley, director of corporate communications at censorware company Proofpoint, says there's no anti-blog conspiracy at work, but that some companies have higher security, privacy and regulatory needs that require greater diligence over what companies can and cannot do. In particular, companies worry that employees might leak sensitive material -- perhaps inadvertently -- while posting comments to blog message boards. In a survey of over 300 large businesses conducted in conjunction with Forrester, Proofpoint found 57.2 percent of respondents were concerned with employees exposing sensitive material in blogs. That's higher than the portion concerned with the risks of P2P networks.

Work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2% of U.S. labor force hours.

Work time spent at blogs unrelated to work will eat up 1.65% of labor force hours.

U.S. workers this year will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years (based on a 24-hour day) or 2.3 million work years (based on a typical nearly 40-hour work week) reading blogs unrelated to the job.

There is strong evidence of workday blogging. Server traffic for Blogads, a network of sites that take ads, spikes during business hours, reflecting page views on about 900 blogs. FeedBurner, a blog technology company, also sees a jump in work-time hits.

Bosses accept some screwing off as a cost of doing business; it keeps employees happy and promotes camaraderie. Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, said blogs have become the favored diversion for "office goof-off time," though he notes it's hard to segregate blog time since blogs often bounce readers to professional media sites.

But at the end of the day, more blogging means less working. Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings, said at-work blog time probably comes in addition to regular surfing -- meaning more time on the Web but less time on the job.

The Automobile Club of Southern California fired the employees in one of its San Diego offices after at least one worker complained to management about feeling harassed by the comments, which were written by employees on the MySpace.com Web site on their own time at home.

Club spokeswoman Carol Thorp said comments were made about other workers' weight and sexual orientation.

The 24-year-old Barnard grad's online journal was a must-read with Vogue and Glamour peons and higher-ups. Other media-centric blogs like Gawker and Media Bistro pondered her identity.

But when news of her true self was unmasked in a mass e-mail this week - and spread faster than an Estée Lauder goody bag around a Condé Nast office - Haobsh saw the downside of fame.

Her bosses at Ladies' Home Journal "thought it displayed a lack of respect for the industry and a lack of professionalism," a contrite Haobsh said yesterday.

"I understand that," she said.

It would be an understatement to say that this was the weirdest week of my life. On Tuesday morning, I had a job I loved, a nice salary and was living in blissful oblivion. Flash forward to today, and I've given interviews to the New York Post, Fox 5 News and CNN (are you kidding me??), have a very, very big interview set for tomorrow (until it actually happens, my lips are zipped), have meetings this coming week with multiple book agents and-oh, yeah, that-am quickly approaching the poverty mark. 24/7 ramen: can't wait!

HOW much is a blogger worth? While Matt Drudge brags he makes close to seven figures from his drudgereport.com, even the little-known, academically-inclined Jim Romenesko is making serious coin from the Poynter Institute in Tampa, Fla. According to the rival newsblues.com Web site, "haughty media blogger" Romenesko is paid $170,000 a year, which works out to $680 a day (figuring 250 work days annually). The tabloid-detesting Romenesko wouldn't confirm or deny the number, but told us: "Money is deposited into my checking account every other week, and I'm happy for that." And we're happy he's happy.

''No more driving to the corner to buy flowers and hand-deliver them," he wrote on his Web page. ''Nope. Now I go online to places like Dot Flowers.com and 1-800-Flowers. I like Dot a little better just because of the personal touch."

Dot Flowers's ad agency paid Cutler $5 this spring to promote the florist and put a link to its website on his blog, or online journal, short for web log. Cutler, who does not disclose the payment on his blog, is one of more than 2,000 bloggers whom marketer USWeb enlisted to hawk products and services. That helped the nascent florist double its sales in the first three months and shoot up near the top of Google's search list, according to USWeb.

While Marqui remains open about paying bloggers, not all companies are so forthcoming. Though laws exist to protect consumers from deceptive practices and false advertising in other media outlets, there is no formal oversight in the blogosphere.

For now, self-regulation rules. ''We try to be as ethical as possible," said Ed Shull, chief executive at USWeb, the ad agency that pays bloggers to post about Dot Flowers and other companies.

''In our opinion, paying bloggers is no different than Tiger Woods getting money to wear the Nike logo."

When we contract with a given company and provide a qualified blogger, the company pays Bloggeropoly a finder's fee amounting to 25% of what will be paid paid to the blogger during the first-year. (This is in keeping with standard recruiting industry policy.)

- You're personally responsible
- Abide by existing rules
- Keep secrets
- Be nice

- Add value
- Respect copyright
- Follow the law
- Cite and link
- Discuss with your manager

When the staff at a Scholastic Corp. unit heard that Cindy Eng was being hired as their editorial head earlier this year, they did an online search of her name.

Fortunately for Eng, their searches led them right to her Web portfolio, a personal Web site that trumpeted her professional accomplishments, including the books she helped publish and the companies she's worked for. "I think it set their minds at ease that their new boss knew what she was doing,'' said the Fanwood, N.J., resident.

Eng's story illustrates what some career consultants have been telling professionals for years: Having an online presence is an important part of managing your career. They are recommending that people build online identities through Web portfolios, blogs and other forms of online publishing.

Of course, blogs are also hard to maintain. For that reason, they're not as widely recommended as Web portfolios.

People who want to start building an online presence should start with a Web portfolio, especially if they worry they may not have the time to work on a blog. Another way to build an online presence is to contribute to other people's blogs, said Arruda.

Again, you want to keep the Web portfolio professional. That means no family photos or personal information beyond your name, email address and work history.

Also, be careful not to rely too heavily on your online presence when networking, recruiters said. An online presence is nice, but it's not important in certain industries, said Scot Melland, president and CEO of technology recruiting company Dice in New York.

Joel Johnson, who writes Gizmodo for Denton, called the pay structure "Byzantine" but says he's happy with the amount he's paid. "The worst part, though, is that so much of the pay is based on increasing hits, but we as editors don't have any control over anything but the editorial content," Johnson said via e-mail. "That's the most important part, sure, but it sucks to think you might lose money because somebody decided to give you a retarded elf or a queer ninja as a mascot. ... I'd rather be writing than learning how to trick Google."

Meanwhile, rival blog publishing house Weblogs Inc. has ditched its original idea of splitting ad revenues 50/50 with bloggers. The company's chairman and mouthpiece Jason McCabe Calacanis admits he was wrong about the concept, and that only 1 in 20 writers went for the deal. Now he's paying a flat fee for bloggers ranging from $100 to $3,000 per month, and is signing up two to five people per blog because of the focus on part-time help.

This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they're losing control of it.

Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like -- you guessed it -- blogs.

Currently, the form I signed for my company says that the employee is allowed to peruse the Internet or send personal messages, but it should be kept to a minimum, and "not interfere with any company affairs." It's an honor system of sorts, but every one of us knows we take advantage of it so we can do our daily communications and (for you angry bloggers out there) circumvent our stress.

Eventually though, I wonder to what degree companies will do away with this honor system. That a security guard server will survey every time Mark updates his blog or visits a site that can't possibly have anything to do with company business, and hit me with an automated e-mail that docks me a twenty-spot for all unauthorized activity. While I erase my Firefox cache almost every day, I wonder if that even matters anymore. How long will it be before our Internet freedoms at work are taken away for good?

It takes time to build a profitable blog. You do not just become a Professional Blogger anymore than you just become a Professional Golfer. It is not a decision you make, it is something you work towards over time.

We pay a set rate of $2,500 a month. But one thing that's interesting about Gawker is that we've begun to incentivize our writers based on the traffic to their sites. Our bloggers can earn more money that way. They can more than double their salary based on the number of pages [viewed].

"on january 28th, 2005, i was terminated from google. either directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason. this came as a great shock to me because two days ago we had looked at my blog and removed all inappropriate content - the comments on financial performance and future products. for my next entries, i was very cognizant of my blogging content, making sure to stay away from these topics. i mean, as much as i like to be open and honest about communicating to users and customers, i'm not insubordinate. if i was told to shut down this blog, i would have."