Sharing your thoughts and interests online is becoming a societal norm. But before you jump on WordPress to start your own blog, check out these cautionary tales of a few writers who shared too much.

Heather Armstrong, Dooce.com

Arguably the first person fired for blogging and probably the most successful, Heather B. Armstrong began her hilarious blog Dooce in 2001 while “making a lot of money as a web designer in Los Angeles.” Dooce contained quirky narratives as well as regular features such as “How to Charm Me” and “How to Annoy Me.” [Personal favorite: August 8, 2001.] The latter is what caused problems. Highlighting amusing, albeit thinly veiled, references to her office and specific co-workers, Armstrong regularly posted until late February 2002, when she was approached by her bosses and told that an anonymous coworker had emailed every VP in her company to complain about the unsavory remarks on Dooce. She was fired. Six years later, Armstrong is still blogging on Dooce and it’s become the sole source of income for her family. The site has won numerous awards, including a Bloggie in 2008 for Best Weblog in the United States, and was named one of the World’s 50 Most Powerful Blogs by the Guardian. Not too shabby for a blog that started with a poem about Carnation milk.

Joyce Park, Troutgirl

Way back before MySpace and Facebook dominated the social networking stratosphere, there was Friendster. Developed in Mountain View, California, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, the site featured most of the components we’re used to seeing on social networking sites—sections for personal information, photos and, of course, blogging. Joyce Park worked for Friendster as a web developer, but was also a recreational user of the site. Park, known in the blogosphere as Troutgirl, wrote only three times about her company’s upgrade to PHP/MySQL programming before getting canned in August 2004 by CEO Scott Sassa for “stepping over the line.”

Backlash toward the company soon followed as people wondered how a site that promoted the sharing of personal information could react so harshly to one of their employees doing just that. Popular blogger—and Yahoo! employee—Jeremy Zawodny publicly canceled his Friendster account and encouraged others to follow suit. Though the site saw no considerable decrease in subscribers, Friendster’s popularity has waned in recent years. Park is still blogging as Troutgirl, but has understandbly switched to WordPress.

Mark Jen, Ninetyninezeros

When it comes to awesome workplaces, it seems that Google tops almost everyone’s lists. That’s what Mark Jen thought in 2005 when he was hired by the online superpower. After his first day, Jen started blogging. He wrote his impressions of the company, both positive and negative, on his nerdily named Ninetyninezeros (a reference to the mathematical term “googol”), including a comprehensive breakdown of the health benefits provided by Google and those allocated by his former employer, Microsoft. (He concluded that Microsoft’s were better.) Eleven days later, Jen was fired. Though Google never officially confirmed that blogging was behind Jen’s departure, Jen himself wrote, “I goofed and put some stuff on my blog that’s not supposed to be there. I’m learning that Google is understandably careful about disclosing sensitive information, even vague financial-related things. The quickest way for me to fix the situation at the time was to take it all down. Now I’m back up.” He continued blogging at Plaxoed and later rose & snail. Lesson learned: Don’t mess with the Internet’s most powerful search engine.

Jessica Cutler, The Washingtonienne

In the spring of 2004, Jessica Cutler was working as an assistant for Ohio Senator Republican Mike DeWine. In addition to her swank job on the Hill, she was also engaging in some Lewinsky-like extracurriculars outside the office. Cutler chronicled these affairs on her blog, The Washingtonienne, naming her lovers by initials. The posts were short, sweet and contained all the salacious details any gossip-fiend could ever crave. A few weeks after she began the blog, the folks at snarky D.C. gossip blog Wonkette discovered the site and reposted it—in its entirety—on their own pages. Within hours, Washington was abuzz with Cutler’s torrid tales. That afternoon, coincidentally Cutler’s birthday, she was fired for “misuse of staff computers.” For the next several weeks, both media professionals and government representatives harshly criticized Cutler, calling her names and condemning her acts. Don’t feel too bad for her, though. A few months later, she posed for Playboy.com and in 2005 she published The Washingtonienne: A Novel. Cutler is currently still blogging at Jessica Cutler Online, but the original posts from The Washingtonienne can be found in Wonkette’s archives.

Ellen Simonetti, Queen of Sky

Ellen Simonetti had worked as a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines for eight years before starting her blog Queen of Sky. Created to help her deal with the grief of losing her mother, Simonette began writing about her day-to-day life, including her travels with the airline. Like with most of her other posts, her travel writing was snarky and irreverent and caught the attention of readers. Including her bosses at Delta Air Lines. After seeing supposedly risque photos of Simonette in her uniform on the blog, Simonetti was suspended and then fired on October 29, 2004. Since then, she’s been appealing to the airline company to get her job back, but the case has been postponed until Delta deals with their current financial woes. Simonetti maintains that her dismissal violated her right to free expression and was an act of sexual discrimination. She’s spent the last four years fighting this cause and has set up The International Bloggers Bill of Rights. Simonetti stills blogs at Queen of Sky and has adapted her blog into a book. She has also appeared on various talk shows, including The Montel Williams Show.

Michael Tunison, Kissing Suzy Kolber

The Washington Post is one of those newspapers that prides itself on being a bastion of old-school journalism. And they do not take kindly to being disrespected. Just ask former employee Michael Tunison. He was fired from his position as an editorial aide this past April after his superiors discovered that he was blogging under the name Christmas Ape (an obscure Simpsons reference) at Kissing Suzy Kolber. KSK is a cheeky blog about the NFL where just about anything goes in terms of language and content. Tunison’s posts, like many of the others on the site, were riddled with profanity. On April 14, 2008, he identified himself as an employee of the Post and later told industry insider mag Editor & Publisher that he believed that this work was “safe” under the paper’s freelance policy. The Post disagreed, and he was fired for “bringing discredit to the paper.” Tunison was outraged by his dismissal, claiming “the core spirit of The Washington Post [is] full disclosure.” Since his firing, Tunison has become a full-time blogger, contributing to Deadspin and SportsbyBrooks. Here’s a recent interview that appeared in Gelf Magazine.

Erica Palan, Fear and Loathing in Franklin Mills

[Full disclosure: This is me.] In college, I worked for a company that owned two different stores in the same mall—one sold baby clothes, the other sold plus-size fetish lingerie. Take a moment to fully grasp that concept.

I also interned at Philadelphia Weekly, where I befriended the paper’s hilarious blogger and would often tell him the crazy things that would happen at the mall. (Co-workers having phone sex, for example.) One day he asked me to write these stories for his blog and it seemed too hilarious an opportunity to pass up. A few weeks later, while working in the baby store, a customer mentioned the blog to one of my coworkers, who then reported it to the manager. The manager then asked me to track down the posts, because I was “the most into the Internet.” Two days later I told her that I hadn’t been able to find anything. When I arrived at work the next weekend, I was called into the backroom where every other store employee was waiting to confront me. They’d not only found my blog posts—admittedly easy to locate with minimal Googling—but they’d printed them and hung them on the walls. One by one, they told me how hurt they were that I’d divulged their idiosyncrasies and “exploited their trust.” I was fired on the spot. Fortunately, PW had just hired me as listings editor, where I still work a year later. So far, no one has had phone sex in my presence.

Erica Palan is an occasional contributor to mental_floss. We hope this doesn’t get her canned.