Keep an eye on what is happening at Bear Stearns and the story on Richard Marin’s "Whim of Iron" blog here and here.  This was, as I understand it, a personal blog but he discussed the pace of activity at Bear as their hedge funds teetered on collapse in addition to more mundane/personal things like movies he had seen.  All good stuff and great blogs provide a personal view of the author in addition to commentary on their respective domain of knowledge. 

That said, a securities firm like Bear Stearns is heavily regulated and as the dust settles on this latest hedge fund debacle they will be under a serious microscope with the lawyers and discovery requests close behind.

This is another case study on personal blogging and the corporate world.  In my case, this is my personal blog, I pay for it, Typepad hosts it, and it is consistent with our company policy on blogs.  Something tells me that this was not sanctioned by Bear and, as this NY Times story points out, Mr. Marin has now password protected the site.

Does using your company email address as your preferred email contact (as Mr. Marin did) no longer make it personal?  Does talking about what you do at work cause it to become a formal business record?  Assuming a blog falls under he definition of "electronic communications", should it have been properly supervised according to NASD regs?  All great questions that need further research on my part.  Posting to a blog without access controls puts it out there for anyone in the world to see and *should* factor in to any post you make.

Regardless of the outcome for Mr. Marin (he has already been replaced), I am long Bear Stearns as they are one of the best run firms on Wall Street.

UPDATED: 

Looks like someone over at Google is learning this same lesson.  Lauren Turner decided to offer a bit of advice to healthcare companies to use Google ads opposite coverage of Sicko by "I keep trying to relive Roger & Me" director Michael Moore.  She did this on her Google blog and quickly had to offer up a clarification.  Here’s some good perspective on it from Robert Scoble.