Saying too Much
Posted on: December 1, 2008
While I was out of the office Friday an interesting story broke about the Belgium Minister of Defence and a New York 
barmaid. You can find the full story on Tech Crunch, but the basics of the story is that the Minister of Defence was due to have a meeting in New York, but although it was cancelled decided to go with his team anyway funded by the Tax payers money.
A few drinks later in a Belgium bar in New York he was relaying this to the barmaid who herself was from Belgium and in disgust blogged about it the next day. The Minister was notified of her blog and phoned up the manager of the bar and the barmaid was fired. Now this information was in the public domain the Minister made a public statement about how this demonstrated how dangerous blogging is.
The response among different blogs has been varied with people divided on whether the waitress was right to blog about about what she was told, whether it matters that she was working at the time, and whether or not she should have been fired.
The way I see it is that it is like a new form of paparazzi, but instead of stories being focused on famous people it can now affect any body. The blogosphere has allowed anybody to be a journalist and so in turn has meant anyone can be a target of their conversation.
In regards to the story my opinion is that if the MP was stupid enough to openly talk to strangers and tell them how he was using tax payers money to go on a jolly then he deserves to be caught out. With the barmaid I believe that she had every right to blog about what she was told, although it may have been wiser to keep the facts of the conversation more generic as this may have stopped her from getting fired.
Social Whisper 
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