Office politics was bad enough when it was limited to impromptu one-on-one's over by the coffee machine, but now we've got the Internet. I don't mean email. Not only does everyone know that the content of your email belongs to your organization, but in all likelihood, they're monitoring it. At least, that's the smart assumption. What I'm talking about is some joker (as my father would say) creating a free blog at a free website under an assumed name, completely outside work - and then inviting everyone to get in on the action.

One such web log has been running since last December, and its target is Los Alamos National Laboratory and specifically its embattled director, Dr. G. Peter Nanos. Read it, and it has all the earmarks of old-fashioned office gossip. Facts merge with complaints merge with opinions and sophomoric banter. Copies of press articles are posted, just like they were once Xeroxed and passed around hand-to-hand.

But now the gossip is on-line and fully archived, organized month-by-month and searchable. The jungle grapevine is not only electronic, it now casts a permanent shadow that never goes away.

To be absolutely accurate, this particular blog is powered for free by google, although its creator and editor is not anonymous. The blogger-in-chief is one Douglas Roberts, a computer programmer who's been on staff at Los Alamos for some twenty years. While he's certainly known to Los Alamos and has been interviewed by the press, he's not generally recognizable. His picture on the blog in question displays a motorcyclist on a country road against a backdrop of beautiful mountains. If you had the photo in your hand, and he was the only other person in the room, I challenge you to put two and two together. Which means Roberts maintains a certain privacy in public, which he recognizes is an issue.

On the blog, he addresses anonymity directly. Should you want to make a contribution, it's your choice - sign your contribution, or don't. And he outright presumes that existing managers "do not want people to know their true feelings about current upper management layer," providing instructions for a "super-safe double-blind way to post anonymously."

This is classic office politics, pure and simple. Say anything you want. For whatever effect you're trying to achieve.

Anyone who's worked in an organization has seen what rumors can do. In my own experience, it was common knowledge I was sleeping with the executive director, and that I had also publicly announced that I wanted to sleep with one particular female in the next tech group over. Neither was true, and in tribute to how gossip only falls on willing ears, there was no third rumor with the excited news that this would make me a switch-hitter!

The sleeping-with-the-boss idea floated among my fellow managers, who were all competing for attention from the same boss, while the sleeping-with-the-girls idea spread through the party crowd, who just didn't get me.

Frankly, if there is a legitimate role for off-site blogging, I'll be darned if I know what it is. And I just can't shake the feeling that this kind of rumor-mongering is mean-spirited. Just as one might argue it would be mean-spirited of me to point out that you can google the Internet and discover that some 16 years ago, in 1989, this same Doug Roberts posted his impressions from attending the Los Alamos lecture of Dr. Stanley Pons. Roberts wrote, "I came away from the presentation believing that the 'cold fusion' phenomenon is real, not a laboratory mistake."

And thus we find that Mr. Roberts already knows that the public statements of very serious people don't always pan out. Much less, the anonymous ones.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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