Of Banning and Blocking

Not many are complaining the growth of Internet and arrival of Web 2.0, except a few. Hardware and Bandwidth going cheaper, on one hand has been beneficial to web companies, it is growing headache for sysadmins. They have strict orders from respective companies to control the bandwidth cost. Authorities have troubles keeping their employees productive with arrival of blogs, social networking and what not. Result? Banning of youtube,orkut,blogger is in rage. Can't do much about banning of orkut and youtube, but there are some workarounds for blogging.

One, Use PKBlogs. This was created when Pakistani government imposed ban on blog and in totally unrelated event later on by Indian government. Simple and easy to use, but it has issues with images and people have raised some privacy concerns.

Two, Get an RSS Reader. RSS phenomenon is fast catching attention everywhere. Concept is simple, instead of roaming all around the internet, just gather the places you are interested in and use it, which Google calls Inbox for your web. There are both online and offline RSS readers available. I strongly recommend Google Reader above all. IE7 and Flock have built-in RSS reader.

Well that's pretty much it. Necessity is mother of invention, they say, but no donuts for me as orkut remains banned at my workplace.