According to a recent study by Proofpoint, an email security and date protection company, 10 percent of companies surveyed have fired an employee for violating company policy regarding blogging and/or posting to forums while on the clock.

Although Ryan Singel at Wired's Threat Level blog speculates that the survey results may be a bit inflated or exaggerated based on the position Proofpoint has as a company in the business of selling email monitoring programs. Christopher Null at the Yahoo! tech blog The Working Guy considers the stats to be a bit more realistic, pointing out: "It's important to note that those statistics refer to the number of companies that have taken any action, not the number of workers who've been affected."

The survey included 308 companies, 28 of which have apparently fired bloggers for going against company policy.

Interested in the study in it's entirety? You can download the full report entitled "Outbound Email and Content Security in Today's Enterprise, 2007" here.