Getting Dooced

UrbanDictionary.com now defines "dooced" as losing your job for something you wrote on your online blog -- I learned this from the following almost recommended reading, under USA Today's provocative headline:Warning: Your clever little blog could get you fired.

This article is, like duh, should it be any surprise that if you blog about work, your employer might have an interest in what you say about the company, your experience there, employee morale, the intellectual property that might be at stake?

But it does offer some interesting statistics about blogging, American-style:

Blogs are proliferating as fast as a computer virus. According to a report this year by public relations firm Edelman and Intelliseek, a provider of business-intelligence solutions, about 20,000 new blogs are created daily, and an estimated 10 million U.S. blogs will exist by the end of 2005. [...]

More than 8 million adults in the USA have created blogs, according to two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a non-profit research center studying the Internet's social effects. And 32 million Americans are blog readers - a 58% jump in 2004.