A Chat with Mark Jen (Blogger Fired by Google)

John Battelle asked some good questions about the Mark Jen controversy. Believe it or not, I met Mark tonight (err, "last night" to most of you at this point) and had a chance to chat with him about his brief time at Google and various other things. I'm not going to reveal everything we discussed, but I would like to clarify a few things and respond to John's request for commments. First off, nothing Mark said surprised me. Yes, he was fired from Google. It was directly related to his blog. He was employed there for just a couple of weeks. Mark's a good guy. He doesn't believe he was doing anything wrong (neither do I based on what he told me). In fact, he wasn't even aware of the blogosphere's Google obsession--or at least the search bloggers who watch every little thing Google does--until this happened. Let's just say that he was surprised by his sudden fame. John (linking directly to my RSS feed for some odd reason) Scoble and I have to say about this. So here's my take. At Yahoo Yahoo has been very good at dealing with blogging. A lot of people at Yahoo read some of what I write here. Some of them are even on our executive team. If I write Dan (our COO), there's a really good chance he'll hear about it. He may even read it himself. The same probably goes for Jeff is a big supporter of the those used by Sun Microstems. The idea is to let all employess know that it's okay to blog about life at Yahoo, as long as you're smart about it. At Google Last Thursday I lad lunch at Google for my second time (the first was Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Jeremy Zawodny's blog