If you think you can post anything on your blog and then simply delete that post later and pretend nothing happened, you’re dead wrong. RSS readers and aggregators get a snapshot and cache of your content before you can say “I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can’t prove anything.”

It looks like someone with an MSDN blog account made a mistake. Stuart Padley, a Microsoft Developer, accidentally posted something called “Working on Life Drive?” and it says that he was hand picked to join a small team to work on Windows Live Drive. The post was quickly deleted but not before Bloglines had a chance to cache the article.

Windows Live Drive is Microsoft’s upcoming online storage service. - Forevergeek

Here’s the cache of the post on Bloglines.

Looks like Microsoft’s PR people have conflicting views on using blogs for reaching out to the public. Yeah, Scoble was great, but post-Scoble, I don’t think the Microsofties have a good grasp of how the blogosphere works.

The most interesting aspect of this story is that someone yelled and got the post pulled down. Microsoft should know there is no better way to get someone’s attention in the blogosphere than pulling down a post. Robert Scoble calls this “breaking into jail” and I agree. If you are going to give your developers blogs, let them post. Nothing Stuart wrote was particularly confidential – we all know this is coming. - TechCrunch

Lessons learned:

# Think twice before hitting that publish button. People are watching. Even worse, servers are caching your content.

1. Think even harder before putting that unintentionally-published content down. This will be mistake #2. People will certainly raise hell over how you try to cover your ass this way.
   

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