Prior to that, however, I was with an employer that blocked many sites - blogs were among one of them. Being in the IT department I was privy to information about which sites were blocked. Some of our users were never even aware that they were missing out on these blocked sites. I was made aware rather quickly since I maintained a blog, and on down-times, wished to update or add to my blogs. Unfortunately I could not, and had to update my site outside of the corporate network just like anyone else.
I can understand blocking blogs from corporate networks, they can certainly cause a distraction if a user spent their day reading or updating blogs - it can be rather habit-forming. However, on more than one occasion I had to troubleshoot computer issues and the fastest way to find solutions was on the internet - by "googling" them. And on more than one occasion (several, as a matter of fact) the solution was staring at me right on the screen. Unfortunately, it was posted on a blog site. It wasn't a matter of requesting that I be given access to that blog site to read the article. It was a matter (from corporate perspective) of denying or allowing access to all users since the filtering was performed from the corporate firewall. Such sites were blocked to all corporate computers with no exception, not even those used by IT personnel. A lot of issues - as well as time saved - could have been addressed by reading up on those articles, and no amount of argument on my part would sway them to see it my way.
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