Business Week Online has an article entitled You Are What You Post, about the backlash of people being so open online. Many employers do web searches on people they hire now and are finding web sites, blogs, MySpace accounts and so forth.

Schools are warning parents about Google’s danger to the MySpace generation, for whom the Internet functions as a virtual diary-meets-barstool confessional. Adolescents try on identities and new behaviors like sweaters. Only now they are trying them on in front of the world. A Pew Research survey found that more than half of all online teenagers are ripping, mixing, and burning their own content, usually placing their creations right alongside their names and photos. The teenagers on the “companies and co-workers” section of MySpace who are talking smack about employers like Blockbuster (BBI), Target (TGT), and Gap (GPS) are clearly unaware of the implications. “People need to realize that this is like putting stuff up on the 6 o’clock news,” says employment lawyer Garry G. Mathiason, a partner at San Francisco’s Littler Mendelson. “Once you’ve opened the drapes, people can see everything. They can see your past life.”

That’s why Dave Fonseca, a senior at the University of Massachusetts, pulled his Facebook profile down in December. “Employers are looking at these things,” he says. (It’s easy for people to get passwords and noodle around on the site.) Fonseca even knows the verb for people who get fired for what they put on their Web sites: “dooced.” The name comes from Dooce.com, the blog of Heather B. Armstrong, who got canned after writing about her job on her blog.

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