Companies Blocking Employees from Reading RSS

I dream of a world without prejudice. Wars will be a distant memory. No child will go to bed hungry. A organizations will trust their employees enough to let them subscribe to RSS feeds. In case you hadn't heard about it, some companies have begun blocking RSS feeds at the firewall. The rationale for this short-sighted, counterproductive bit of paranoid stupidity ranges from bandwidth worries to productivity concerns. The first I heard of this was from a reader of my monthly email newsletter. I've been cajoling my 2,500-or-so readers to switch to RSS for well over a year now. This particular reader wrote back saying he'd be happy to give RSS a try but for the fact that his company has banned RSS. There's an amusing irony in the fact that next year companies will shell out over $6 billion for applications that monitor and/or block web surfing, instant messaging, keystrokes, and now RSS, according to an IDC study. A Websense VP and General Counsel Mike Newman:

The rationale behind monitoring employees, according to Newman, is that a computer at work is a corporate tool for enhancing the employee's productivity. Because some people abuse that privilege by sending personal e-mail and viewing movies during working hours, employers feel they have little choice but to monitor what their workers are doing.