Dear Bloglines, Tear down the wall!

I've been taking some wonderful Apple workshops in a district down the road a bit, and have been frustrated time after time when I try to check my bloglines account there. It's blocked. One reason for it to be blocked is that the url contains the word 'blog' and that organization (an IU) that provides the filter blocks everything with the word blog in it. Outrageous, I know. But, in the case of bloglines, the person in charge of the filtering decisions always points to the image wall in bloglines as the reason to have it blocked. Today I went back in there to see for myself, and the very first screen contained three images of topless women among the images. *FLAG!* *Sirens!* *Danger, Will Robinson!*

I've written to them before, but I wrote again to the bloglines folks to ask them to PLEASE remove that VERY UNNECESSARY "feature." It serves NO PURPOSE! Worse, it's forcing the schools in PA to block the site, which means that we must use other sites (netvibes, pageflakes, google reader). And, in my opinion, the bloglines site has some otherwise excellent features that keep me there for my home use. I LOVE the "Keep new" option, and the 'email this' option, for example. But, as long as that image wall remains I cannot use it in school, and what a shame that is. I can't even point folks to my public feed roll there.

I had commented on this before in this blog and a short while later, this response (http://www.bloglines.com/about/news#133) came from the bloglines folks, and I thought the situation was resolved. But, I never look at that feature so I didn’t know if it was resolved or not. It’s NOT.

So, I wonder if it would have ANY impact if the education blogosphere would join in on this campaign to get the image wall removed. Do you think? It certainly can’t hurt. Do YOU think that the feature is unnecessary and are you finding that it’s being blocked in your school, as a result? If so, PLEASE visit the bloglines site and use their Contact Us page to ask them to remove it. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan (and Pink Floyd), “Mr Bloglines, tear down the wall!”