Web 2.0 Corporate Access

I’ve been working with Steve Wexler and the eLearningGuild on the eLearning 2.0 survey. This is resulting in some pretty interesting data such as the Web 2.0 Tools Used in corporations. I also recently saw some surprising results that show that some corporations are locking down their firewall so that employees can't get to common web 2.0 sites.

One of the comments I received on Network Effects - YouTube - Video Blogs and More that had a video hosted on YouTube was:

We see and hear more and more about corporate content published on YouTube. How many companies are giving their employee's access? If there is a way to separate the good from the rest, I'd love to hear about it.

Well I can help answer the question about access to YouTube and other Web 2.0 tools.



This shows data only for corporations (excludes education and government). So, YouTube is blocked 27.7%. Wow, that's quite a bit.

Of course, factor in that 2.6% tell us that Wikipedia is blocked. So, maybe reduce all of the other numbers by that amount. Who blocks Wikipedia after all?

I somewhat understand why MySpace might get blocked (28%) but given how many people are using Facebook for business connections, blocking it at almost the same rate is a little bit of a surprise.

What somewhat surprised me is how much other sites are being blocked:

• Twitter 11.5%
  
• Digg 9.8%
  

But most surprising - LinkedIn being blocked by 7.9%. If I was CEO of these corporations, I'd make sure my HR/recruiting folks and my Biz Dev folks had access. Why shoot yourself in the foot? Of course, if it were me, I would absolutely open up access to LinkedIn. It's such an amazing resource to find expertise and get answers. Yes, your employees might use it to go find another job, but come on.

This also shows the discrepancy in the perspective of getting information via a resource like Wikipedia vs. getting it from other people via something like LinkedIn. Corporations have not woke up to the need for knowledge workers to reach out for expertise.

Now the second half of the question is: How can you separate good YouTube from bad YouTube content? Great question. Anyone have an answer?

Keywords: firewall, blocking, barrier.