Click Here For A Hot Rumor About Your Boss

By ADAM COHEN

Movie producers are trashed as psychotic and nasty. Talent agents' misdeeds and duplicities are dissected and mocked. Rumors are gleefully spread about which studio executives are about to be sacked. Ho hum. It's just another scurrilous day on ifilmpro.com's "Who Is the Most Insane Person in the Biz?" message board.

Ifilmpro.com is a high-powered Hollywood website featuring movie-industry data and showcasing new talent. But the part of the site that has everyone talking is "The Buzz," an anonymous chat section restricted by password to industry insiders. In "Executive Shuffle," studio brass dish on who's up and who's down. "Assistant Central" is a drone's-eye view of life in Tinseltown.

To e-mail and e-commerce, add e-office gossip. In industry after industry, the kind of chat that once occurred at the water cooler is moving online. Journalists are hooked on Jim Romenesko's MediaNews poynter.org/medianews) a site that in addition to aggregating news stories about the media posts e-mail from media professionals. (A recent topic: a schoolyard fight between journalists and p.r. agents in which the reporters accused the flacks of being overly aggressive and underinformed.) Investment bankers prefer vault.com where they can keep tabs on which of their colleagues is getting richest and who's sleeping with whom. On greedyassociates.com young lawyers gripe about working conditions and compensation. And truckers can compare rigs and routes on truckinlife.com

Virtual water coolers offer the online equivalent of the kind of banter that workers pick up in the office hallway or over an after-hours beer. At their best, these sites can be as salacious as a hot rumor whispered over a cubicle divider. The Velvet Rope, a music-industry insiders' site, traffics in scuttlebutt about which acts reputedly lip-synch. And as with off-line gossip, sex talk is encouraged. Vault.com recently had a series of postings about a purported call-girl and call-boy ring at a large New York City investment firm that features celebrity look-alikes, including a ringer for the late John F. Kennedy Jr.

Good virtual water coolers turn up in unexpected places. The funeral professionals' discussion board on casketstores.com is oddly riveting, with talk ranging from how to improve public opinion about funeral directors to how to ensure that a casket is airtight. The flight attendants' site on Insidetheweb.com has the feel of a late-night, rear-of-the-plane gabfest, on topics like whether it's O.K. to accept a $100 tip from a passenger (consensus: no) to an attendant's gripping first-person account of her first emergency landing. ("As I strapped myself into my jumpseat, I remember thinking that I was so glad that I had called my boyfriend earlier in the evening just to tell him that I love him.")

And much like off-line gossip, these postings can have an impact. Greedyassociates.com gets up to 80,000 hits a day, and as its name suggests, much of the focus is on compensation. The site charts salaries at large law firms around the country, information that was once hard to come by, putting pressure on the laggards to pay top dollar. "I'm certain we've helped push up salaries," says one of the underground site's organizers. "We've helped create a more perfect market."

Vault.com takes credit for improving work life at the firms it covers. When employees at the Internet-business-strategies firm Agency.com complained about management last summer, its co-founder responded personally. He assured the online posters that Agency.com takes "the messages posted on these boards very seriously" and that it was committed to employee satisfaction. After the dustup, Agency.com created a new position of "chief people officer." (It says the step was unrelated to the Vault postings.)

But along with the power come potential pitfalls. Lawyers are predicting a glut of "cybersmear" libel lawsuits by targets of malicious online gossip. "Companies are not particularly sensitive about someone standing next to a water cooler and griping about someone else," says Blake Bell, a New York lawyer and editor of a website called CyberSecuritiesLaw. "But these messages go out to so many people that they're very concerned." Although the sites give their posters--who generally use pseudonyms--a feeling of anonymity, they're usually not anonymous at all. Faced with a subpoena, most sites will readily divulge a poster's name to the authorities. And that's something a good off-line work pal would never do.