The View From Wisconsin

At the end of January, web security software company OpenDNS released its web trends report for 2010. The heart of the report was the lists of sites blocked the most by employers (otherwise known as "blacklisted" sites), and the corresponding sites that employers specifically allow access to their employees (or "whitelisted" sites).

Lists like this fascinate me because it not only gives you a sense of what employers think are necessary and unnecessary websites for use in the workplace, but it also gives you a sense of which websites are really popular - despite what hit counters and such may suggest.

There is one really odd thing about the two "top 10" lists. Two websites in particular were in the top three on both lists - namely, Facebook and YouTube. Facebook is the most blocked site by employers, but is the second most whitelisted site, behind YouTube. YouTube is the third most blocked site - behind, of all things, MySpace. MySpace is seventh in the whitelisted top 10, which might explain why its popularity is plummeting.

Some of the names in the blacklisted site top 10 aren't surprising: eBay (10th), Orkut (7th), Twitter (5th), and two of the biggest banner ad companies on the net (whom I don't want getting press from my site, so I'm not revealing them).

Google makes its presence known on the whitelist section, with Gmail, Google search, and Translate as the numbers three, four and five most whitelisted sites. Yahoo, for all of its internet history, barely managed to crack the top 10. Microsoft's Hotmail (6th most blocked) doesn't make it on the whitelist top 10 - but internet telephony group Skype (8th) does.

There is one site that doesn't show up on the whitelisted top 10 that is, at first glance, odd: Twitter (5th on the most blocked list). When you think about it, however, it makes sense that it doesn't appear as a whitelisted site; too many people already have a Twitter feed on their smartphone.