Does your company let you surf the net at work?

Do you have access to the internet at work? If so, do you follow the company's guidelines as to how it should be used?

If you don't, be aware that Big Brother may be watching you! A recent analysis of a FTSE 100 company's user logs by IC editor Steve Nichols (steve@infotechcomms.co.uk) revealed some interesting statistics. But first, what are server logs?

Every time you log on at work and start surfing the web you leave an invisible audit trail. Invisible to you that is, but not to the company's system administrators.

As part of some intranet consultancy work I was doing I was given access to a well-known company's server logs - and what they revealed would make most of their employees wince!

The logs show the top 250 users by number of sites visited and the amount of time spent surfing. The top prize went to one user who had spent 99 hours online in the previous month. That's wasn't 99 hours just connected, but 99 hours actively surfing away from site to site - a grand total of 106,000 pages in all.

Even the 250th top user had spent 18 hours surfing and had visited 12,600 pages.

In a company of 7,000 people these 250 stood out like sore thumbs. Yes, many of them need to access the net for their work - some of the top 30 users have to access news services to supply the company intranet with stories.

But the statistics can show much more. They can also show the sites mostly frequently visited and the terms most often searched for.

While you could understand "Google" hitting the big time, "Ebay", "Autotrader" and "Sky" all made it into the top 20 most-visited sites. It is harder to explain away sites like "The Sun", "Friends Reunited", www.pistonheads.com or www.dogpages.org.uk. Oh well, at least there was no porn - which would have resulted in disciplinary action at the least.

The number 24 most often searched for term was "football", while "holiday and "holidays" came in at 68th. "Double Glazing" made it to number 69, while "Fishing", "Terrier" and "Golf" all made appearances.

And all these can be tracked to individual users. The statistics are now made available for all to see, and any offenders can expect a swift knock on their office door or cubicle.

Just make sure that you're not next!

Steve Nichols runs InfoTech Communications, which specialises in producing features, publications and intranet sites for business.