Cisco is changing their corporate policy on blogging in response to the revelation that the blogger Troll Tracker was a Cisco employee named Rick Frenkel working on intellectual property law, and they
don't react with drastic knee jerk restrictions. Wow.
Cisco has obviously had a good reputation in terms of technology, but I've never known much about what they are to work for. As it turns out at least their blogging policies are actually extremely even handed for a major company, and I'm impressed that they have chosen to not only stand by their employee, but expressively point out that he is free to continue to do what he does with the one single caveat that they expect that he (and other Cisco employees) made it clear they are expressing their own opinions when they are making statements related to what they work with at Cisco. Not even a hint at restricting them from posting about the areas he works in.
Contrast this with
the long range of fired bloggers, many of whom were far less of a potential risk for their companies than Rick was (in that Cisco is
already facing lawsuits over the posts made by Frenkel.