The Blogosphere is High School?

My knee-jerk reaction to Mike Arrington’s recent post on TechCrunch is that he has lost his mind. His post was about a blogger who accused TechCrunch of spreading the doom and gloom surrounding the financial crisis. The funny thing is that Arrington believes that because this person, some guy named Dare Obasanjo, is employed by Microsoft, this is now somehow a reflection on Microsoft..even though Dare’s site is a personal blog.

As one of the commenters pointed out, the blog even contains a disclaimer that reads:

“Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer’s view in any way.

© Copyright 2008, Dare Obasanjo – Powered by: newtelligence dasBlog 2.1.8102.813″

And another commenter notes that they work for Cisco, but Cisco has zero influence on what they write.

Mike’s angry backlash against this blogger raises a question that goes all the way back to the days of Dooce and the others who got fired for blogging: does what you say on your personal site reflect on your employer?

Mike Arrington apparently thinks that personal blogs should be sanctioned by employers and, if the employee missteps, they should be fired.

What’s even worse is that Robert Scoble now took the time to post in agreement with Arrington.

The only person who has actually made any sense is Steven Hodson of WinExtra.

This silly feud seems like backward progress to me. I’m pretty sure that most of us have moved on from the days of Dooce and getting fired for blogging. In fact, most employers are pretty cool about people having personal blogs for their personal opinions…and most people, too, know the difference between a personal blog and the official opinions of one’s employer.

For the record, I’m so completely and totally over this, you have no idea. Are you guys as annoyed as I am that adults are playing out petty personal attacks in your RSS reader?  Is the tech blogosphere is some sort of high school clique? Can’t we all be grownups here?

And yes, I write stuff for Microsoft but this post isn’t about them – it’s about grown ups having hissy fits on the net. I really, really, really don’t understand this. Feel free to explain it to me.