Earlier this week, I started noticing something odd. It had finally been long enough since my fifteen minutes of fame that traffic was starting to come back down to a more normal level. Oddly, though, for the past few days I’d been getting a lot of hits from the article in the Seattle P-I about my situation. Obviously, it had been linked somewhere with a decent amount of traffic — but where?

Today, the mystery was solved, thanks to an e-mail from Mike: It turns out that Blogger has posted a new tech support article entitled “How Not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog” which links to the Seattle P-I article.

Do you blog at work? Do you check your referrer logs and surf the blogosphere all day from your office? Do you think it might be funny to mock your co-workers publicly, or that it could be a good idea to post photos of sensitive corporate information on your blog? If only Blogger Support could have reached this unfortunate Blogger sooner. Folks, this doesn’t have to happen to you.

These days, many companies are blog-friendly because they recognize a valuable tool for communication and the sharing of ideas when they see it. However, as with any public medium, care should be exercised from time to time. Here at Blogger, we want you to keep your job and as always, ending your blog should be a last resort reserved only for woeful situations. Fret not gentle blogger, we’ve put together this document to help you keep those paychecks rolling in.

So, apparently I’ve been immortalized by Blogger’s tech support crew, which is resulting in a fair amount of traffic moving from Blogger to the Seattle P-I, and then from their article back to me. Well, hey, any traffic is good traffic, right? ;)

Additionally, I got this in my e-mail today:

From: sinta
Subject: Your blog on CNN
Date: November 22, 2003 11:53:20 PST
To: Michael Hanscom

Hiya Michael

Just want to point out to you that your blog was shown on CNN Global Business just today at 7:30 Swiss time :) It just finished a few minutes ago. They talked about that Microsoft incident you had a while back :)

Just thought you’d like to know ^_^

Bestest regards from Switzerland,
Sinta~

http://www.lockload.com
The one and only He Says, She says double blog.

Apparently, my story is (for the moment) the Energizer Bunny of blogging stories — it just keeps going, and going, and going, and going…

Update: Many thanks to Sudheer from in Beijing for sending me a link to the online version of the CNN piece: The Budding Blogs of Business! Here’s the relevant bit:

Microsoft has taken a benevolent attitude to blogging. But it balked when an employee revealed on his blog how the company had taken delivery of a shipment of Apple computers. He was quickly relieved of his duties.

[See also: The MS Mac BU | Here we go again… | Google to me in eight clicks | Another day, another Doocing | Of blogs, site content, and something funny ]

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