• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 25, 2005

This week, yet another loose-lipped blogger was shown the door by a large company that was unhappy with having its dirty laundry aired in public. By now, this sequence of events has occurred so often it's almost unremarkable--except that this time the dirty laundry was the apparently top-secret fact that Conde Nast's Internet service had temporarily gone down, and the blogger in question, Andrew Krucoff, didn't post that tidbit himself, but forwarded the information to the popular Web log Gawker.

Once Conde Nast management discovered the culprit's identity, he was promptly escorted from the building. The entire incident is recounted on Gawker, including Krucoff's reason for leaking the information--that he was explaining why he wasn't available online to a Gawker editor.

Krucoff, a blogger in his own right, had been at Conde Nast doing freelance work for the company as a research analyst. While he might not technically have been an employee, he was apparently enough of a presence at headquarters that he received Conde Nast e-mails.

You've got to wonder what's really happening when mainstream media companies are so threatened by the blogosphere that they consider it treasonous to reveal a Web service outage.

Obviously, it's about more than an interruption in Internet service--surely Conde Nast management knows that even in the upper echelons of the media world, technology occasionally fails.

Rather, the service outage--and its exposure--revealed a vulnerability that Conde Nast, and probably many other mainstream media companies, would prefer not to think about.

On the one hand, companies have become totally dependent on the Web--so much so that even a temporary outage spurs missives from management. On the other hand, the Web is exerting tremendous pressure on businesses such as Conde Nast. Bloggers are revealing secrets, employees are spending hours each week reading (or writing) blogs, and advertisers are shifting budgets to the Internet.

Actions such as this week's dismissal of Krucoff, show just how vulnerable institutions like Conde Nast really are.