Mark Jen - from the Google PR department

I don't know if you have been following the saga of Mark Jen. The story goes that he:-

1. Joined Google, from Microsoft, on Monday 17th January
2. Made a number of blog posts vaguely critical of Google.
3. Was made to remove them from his blog by his employer, Google
4. Was fired on Friday 28th Jan after 2 weeks with Google

He then stops blogging for a while and reappears on Friday 11th Feb

hi everyone. It's been a hectic two weeks but i'll have some new posts ready soon. if you want up to the minute updates, just subscribe to my RSS feed. in the meantime, to take advantage of the traffic, i've added adsense to my website on the sidebar. don't worry, all proceeds will be going to charity :).

And follows this with

on january 28th, 2005, i was terminated from google. either directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason. this came as a great shock to me because two days ago we had looked at my blog and removed all inappropriate content - the comments on financial performance and future products. for my next entries, i was very cognizant of my blogging content, making sure to stay away from these topics. i mean, as much as i like to be open and honest about communicating to users and customers, i'm not insubordinate. if i was told to shut down this blog, i would have.

There then follows a few entries over the next two weeks which are bland in character, and appear to have been written by a PR man from a large company who needed to fill space and had little to say

Note that Mark Jen has added Adsense, and later Amazon to his site with all proceeds going to charity. Given that at this point he is supposed to be an out of work techie, why on earth would he give the money to charity. If he was genuine, he would need it himself. However if the originator of the "Mark Jen" saga was a hoaxer, but with blue chip credentials, they would be anxious not to be seen to be making money from AdSense

The whole "Mark Jen" thing stinks of a wind up. I am not sure who is behind it, but no doubt the perpetrators are looking for masses of PR (and LINKS galore) one they decide to out themselves.

Hopefully the poor sod in the PR department who is having to fill the site on a spasmodic basis is looking forward to the freedom he will get when his employers allow the Mark Jen site to die.