Monday, June 20, 2005

Controlling internet usage

Are you charged with constraining internet usage to appropriate and work related sites only? If so, here is a useful piece of information. Within some companies where access to news and sports sites are restricted, some creative employees are setting up newsfeeds (e.g. RSS) and having the news fed to them via these methods. Most companies only block the website URL's, not all news feeds. So, the end result of these policies is that, for some employees, they are actually spending MORE time on this unproductive work (setting up and maintaining the feed in addition to reviewing the news) rather than less time because of this policy. I don't have any brilliant solutions to these issues to suggest, just thought the information would be useful for anyone responsible for this type of internet-access control so you could speak intelligently on the topic.