Managing your social graph - getting around the office firewall

Category: Social Media   |  Tags: access corporate use facebook policy Twitter

I should probably keep this for my personal blog, but I just learned of another local company blocking access to social media sites, and that always gets me a little worked up.

I get that Twitter, Facebook and similar sites can be a distraction, and I've fallen victim to mindless clicking myself, but I'm not convinced that productivity increases when people are chained to a desk and isolated from the things that naturally draw their attention.

Where there's a will...

If you're sitting at the office, distracted by a lack of access to Facebook (or just about any site, for that matter), have no fear. The web is smarter than your IT department.

When you visit a website, the request is coming from your computer (yes, I know you know that). But if you call me and ask me to pull up the same site, the request is now coming from my computer. So if a site is blocked at the office, it's time to phone a friend.

Google, that is. (Please don't call me to do this.)

...there's a way

Google has this handy tool called Google Translate, which pulls up a website and allows you to manipulate its language. If you ask Google to translate a site, you're not visiting that site, you're still visiting Google.

Here's the trick: On the Google Translate homepage, type in your destination, and set the language FROM Spanish TO English. The page that's returned may be grayed out, with a Google header at the top, but clicking in the main window should remove this. You should be able to browse freely from here—if you look at the URL of the page, though, you'll see that you're still just googling.

Go ahead, give it a try.

PS: I learned this trick from a high schooler, whose school blocked YouTube from library computers.

Posted Thursday, July 29, 2010

James Collier is chief strategist for Paprika Studios, exploring ways to utilize emerging technologies. He writes about community, social media, and random observations.