Om Malik posted today about how Motorola zapped the blog of the ex-CTO:
In the pre-blog world, when you left a company, they would escort you out of the building. Now they zap your blog. There are rumors that Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior had resigned and was leaving the beleaguered mobile phone maker. Well, those rumors must be true. Suddenly all the entires on her popular blog have been zapped. And if you try and go there, you get redirected to a generic Motorola page.
Ouch.
However, when it comes to the web, deleting is merely an illusion. In the comments to the GigaOM post, Dave points about that the posts can still be found on web.archive.org.
When I left Intel, they kept all of my blog posts live. I even heard from a friend that my web 2.0 blog was still more popular than any other Intel Software blog for months after I left the company. 🙂 Since it was generating traffic, there was no benefit in deleting it.
My gut feel is that removing ex-employee blogs is a rarity and is likely to hurt the company in the long run. Blogs provide valuable content and search engine juice for the company. In the vast majority of cases, keeping the blog live, but removing the employee’s access is probably the best way to handle it.
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