A Talk With Mark Jen About Google Firing

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.

he still maintains). Was this an over-reaction by the search king? Discuss at asked what something about Jerry. In fact, he and I met late last year to discuss employee blogging. I didn't have to sit in a room very long with him to realize that he gets it. Yahoo Search blog, our first "corporate" blog (I dislike that term). He reads blogs every day and wishes we posted every day. He's also proven to be a very good barometer for what's blogworthy and isn't. How many SVPs at other companies can you say that about? I could go on with more exmaples, but that makes my point quite well. Has it all been fun and games? No. I've been at this for a few years now, so there were bound to be problems. To date, I've removed one posting and modified one or two others. Each time, someone paid me a visit to discuss the problem. We went into a conference room and talked it out. All along it very clear to me that we were trying to figure out what's reasonable. The person was quite up-front about the fact that Yahoo doesn't want to be getting in the way of my rights to write what I want to write. Each of us walked away having learned something. We were getting closer to shared understanding of where "the line" is. Oh, and I have managed to piss off, anger, and otherwise frighten more than my fair share of PR folks at Yahoo, including 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