Unless you are a member of a union, a tenured professor, or a government employee it is hard to get fired. This is a good thing for Doug Roberts. If Doug worked in "corporate" America I’d bet he’d be looking for a job. So what did Doug do? He started a blog about his employer, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The first post, from December of last year, seems to be inspired by the fact his research group had been shutdown and he wanted a place to vent. Well, in a few shorts months the topics the blog explores has expanded. According to the New York Times:

A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government’s premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos.

Four months of jeers, denunciations and defenses of Dr. Nanos’s management recently culminated in dozens of signed and anonymous messages concluding that his days were numbered. The postings to a public Web log conveyed a mood of self-congratulation tempered with sober discussion of what comes next.

The Times goes on to report that the blog has registered more than 100,000 visits, a half a million pages viewed, and more than 5,000 comments. But it has also gotten nation press coverage and helped to provide an inside peak into a top-secret government organization which employs 14,000 people on an annual budget of $2.2
billion.

This seems to me to be a somewhat uncharted frontier for blogs (or at least it is for me). We now have "Whistle Blower" laws. It would seem blogs are a great way for a government employee to get the word out to his/her fellow co-workers, as well as the public in general, about what is wrong or right about their agencies. I know my friend at the EPA would have a lot to say.

Does anyone else know of any other blogs similar to this one?