Monday, February 14, 2005

Cincinnati Employees Prevented from Reading Blogs: Is This a Matter of Throwing Out the Baby with the Blog Water?

In an understandable effort to prevent employees from goofing off while on the job, the city of Cincinnati is blocking the reading of many blogs, including one that regularly presents commentary on what's going on in the city and in city government.

Saturday's Cincinnati Enquirer article on the subject has created interest in the blog here in the metropolitan Cincy area and in certain quarters of the blogging world.

A blog cited, Cincinnati Blog, is one of which I'd not heard until I read the article over breakfast on Saturday morning. It's not particularly well written, but makes an attempt to cover a wide range of issues and events in the community. While it has a more liberal bias, I doubt that fact had anything to do with the ban. Like this blog, Cincinnati Blog is parked on blogspot. City officials apparently decided simply to block any and all blog sites published in this way and Cincinnati Blog was an unfortunate victim.

The site is popular. According to SiteMeter, it's averaging 416 hits a day.

Sites like Cincinnati Blog are needed, I think, and I feel that city workers would do well to be exposed to this particular site's ideas and opinions: unlike national media, Cincinnati's local mainstream media has a decidedly conservative bias.

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