James Murray

I have a confession to make: I don't get YouTube. People say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but surely video clips of a man accidentally hit in the testicles with a baseball bat or some kid pretending to be Obi Wan Kenobi with a plastic light sabre must run it close.

I can see no real point in MySpace or Facebook either, beyond the chance to catch up with people I haven't seen in years and rediscover why I lost touch with them in the first place.

Online games leave me equally cold, providing a pale imitation of the Sega Master System, which was pretty rubbish in the first place. And don't even get me started on Second Life, which heralds the end of civilisation as comprehensively as any melting icecap.

But I gather from my friends and colleagues that I am pretty much alone in these reservations. The web, it seems, has never been more compelling; driven by high-speed broadband, collaborative web 2.0 sites and high-definition video.

All this is opening up a huge can of worms for IT chiefs. The web revolution has made it easier than ever for people to access the information they need to do their job better. Just one example is the series of web seminars on how to run a green IT department that IT Week and its sister title Computing are currently hosting. These hour-long interactive web TV shows allow IT staff to hear presentations, ask questions, talk to their peers and download information, without leaving their desks.
But on the flip side, for every valuable piece of business information there are 10 clips of a child falling off a trampoline, and it's pretty distracting for the less motivated members of any workforce. It is impossible to say how many hours are wasted each day by office workers watching inane clips on YouTube that wouldn't even make it onto You've Been Framed.

The question for IT chiefs is what to do about it. Some firms try technical solutions, simply blocking users from surfing the web or trying to filter out material that is not work-related. However, not only is this treating your staff like untrustworthy, naughty children, it can also deny them access to useful online material.

Acceptable usage polices are more effective, but they are often openly flouted, and enforcing them doesn't do much for staff/employer relations.

Firms may have to take an increasingly tolerant approach to surfing. Considering that UK office staff already work the longest hours in Europe, perhaps employers should allow them to while away the occasional 10 minutes playing a cheap Tetris knock-off.

After all, there's no accounting for taste.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!