Unions fight for right to Facebook

The Register has a story about the opposition of labour unions in the UK to the growing trend in IT departments of blocking social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. Brendan Barber, General Secretary of The Trades Union Congress is quoted as saying "It's unreasonable for employers to try to stop their staff from having a life outside work, just because they can't get their heads around the technology." I think perhaps he's missing the point a bit, the problem is workers crossing the line between outside life and work duties. Blocking sites is not necessarily the answer either, but having a clear Internet usage policy would go a long way to avoiding abuse.

Danger Will Robinson!

Hopefully you all know not to trust e-mails asking you to download something, or for that matter not to open e-mails from anyone you don't know, or attachments to e-mails even if they come from someone you do know (unless you are expecting it, and then only after it's been scanned),... The Register has this warning that you should take heed of anyway.

Newspaper or online news?

A survey conducted by British news publishers asked readers of web sites run by traditional news media whether they also purchase hard copies of the paper. The good news for the newspaper publishers is that 80% of the online readers also bought their paper. It appears as though there is a fine line to walk with how much content from the more profitable print media goes into the publisher's web site. If the newspaper ignores the web they are missing out on the growing ad revenues online, but if they publish too much of the content they risk losing readers who pay for their paper to the free web site. See the story at The Register. For the record I usually purchase The Globe and Mail, which I read at the local coffee shop and leave for another patron to enjoy once I've finished... I usually write this sites URL on it next to articles I intend to blog about, shameless self promotion perhaps but it's only fair it was my dollar!