I’m blocked!
Posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 9:23pm. #
A while back, I posted about journalists, in my view, not doing adequate research into a story before printing it.
I discover today that it’s not really journalists’ fault: the computer network of one national newspaper, at least, has extremely restricted access and can’t even see… this website. “Yes, sorry,” said the journalist I was chatting to, “there’s a really fierce firewall here”.
I’ve no idea what this website does that means that a major newspaper wishes to block access – unless it’s related to blocking Media UK which would be an odd decision too – but I’m pretty amazed at that. Reminds me of my days running Media UK as a limited company, when the internet access was so slow (128k ISDN line, shared between 30 people) that it was often quicker to go down the road to the internet cafe.
Anyway, perhaps I’m being a little harsh on some journalists – not their fault if the tools to do their work can be witheld like that. It does explain a whole heap, though: if they can’t see little blogs like mine, then what else can’t they see?
Martin
You can look forward to finding out what state the BBC’s web access is in now it is entirely in the hands of Siemens. I got involved in a trial of the ad-blocking software. They say “Oh, it’ll save bandwidth and we won’t be exposed to potential malicious code and you are working so you don’t want to see any adverts anyway”. I say “So, I’m managing the user experience of a non-commercial web site and I don’t get to even see what commercial web sites are doing because you are blocking half the page for my own benefit. Way to go IT people” ;-)