My friends and I are obsessive followers and voracious readers of 2birds1blog– a comedy blog that chronicles the awkward moments, embarrassing situations and hilarious characters in the life of witty and laugh-out-loud-funny writer “Meg.” Until February, a large part of the blog was inspired by Meg’s dead-end job at an undisclosed company, documenting conferences, meetings and business trips with her infamous “Boss #1” and “Boss #2.” This part of the blog came to a close in February when Bosses #1 and #2 approached Meg with a stack of printed out 2birds1blog posts and announced that she’d been fired and should expect a forthcoming defamation suit. In other words, Meg got dooced.

“Dooced,” a phrase coined after the 2002 termination of Heather Armstrong (of dooce.com), has become a common way to refer to bloggers fired for blogging about their professional life. Heather was also fired for writing about her workplace on her anonymous blog, and she and Meg are not alone — since the emergence of new media, several bloggers have been let go from their companies after their employers took issue with their online presence. In 2005, Mark Jen, a (very) short-term Google employee, was fired for his blog where he wrote posts reviewing his new job at Google — for example,  posts comparing his health insurance coverage with Google versus his plan with his former employer, Microsoft. Jessica Cutler, AKA the Washingtonienne, was let go from Ohio Senator Mark DeWine’s office for misuse of office computers after her blog — which recounted her sexcapades with fellow employees on Capitol Hill — was discovered by Congressional staff members. And a Delta flight attendant was terminated in 2004 for her blog “Queen of the Sky,” where she posting on-flight photos of her with her uniformed co-workers that Delta deemed inappropriate. After learning of her termination, the flight attendant, Ellen Simonetti, immediately searched for a company policy against blogging — and couldn’t find one.

When Meg was fired, my phone went off for hours with texts and calls from my jilted friends. While our obsession and imagined real-life friendship with Meg might border on creepy, we were concerned for legitimate reasons. She had never referred to her company by name and all of her coworkers and bosses were referred to using carefully crafted (yet offensive) nicknames. Meg’s company didn’t have a socia media policy that prohibited her from blogging, anonymously or otherwise. We’ll learn this week in J412 how corporations are “catching up” to new media by enacting social media policies, but it’s interesting to look at the cases of employee “misuse” that encouraged the creation of such policies while costing several employees their jobs.

Karly Bolton is a junior at the University of Oregon. You can find her on Twitter or on LinkedIn.