Metaforix@

Advice to the bloglorn

The new issue of Debbie Weil's Wordbiz Report features my column, "Advice to the bloglorn: Top 3 tips to banish fear of blogging."

Debbie summarizes my approach this way: "Don't be afraid of the technology, she counsels. Just plunge in."

That's right. If you've been leery of blogs, newsreaders, and RSS feeds -- the names alone give you a headache, let alone the technology behind them -- follow the link to my column and e-mail me in the morning.

Full disclosure: "Clueless in Cyberspace" is a composite character. But I'll be continuing the column, answering questions from those new to blogs and blogging, on an occasional basis, probably in this space. (I'll let you know for sure.) So pluck up your courage and enjoy the benefits of blogs.

Another big gun aimed at mandatory site registrations

In my digital issue of October's PC Magazine, tech curmudgeon John C. Dvorak inveighs against the proliferating "demand that people register just to read one darn article" or to post a comment on newspaper and magazine websites. (Dvorak acknowledges at the outset that his views will draw flak from his own employers, who require registration in order to post a comment. I hope that doesn't explain why this column doesn't yet appear on the PC Magazine site!)

For Dvorak, there's only one legitimate reason to require registration: to collect the e-mail addresses of people who want to receive e-mail information from the site. Why do over half of U.S. newspaper sites require registration, Dvorak wonders? Then he answers his own question.

Dvorak concludes that print publications deliberately create barriers to their websites in "a feeble attempt to emphasize the printed version of the paper at the Web site's expense," thereby creating the impression that "the more popular a publication becomes online, the more money it must be losing." His recommendation? "Maybe it's time to change the model."

A change of model is undoubtedly overdue. For the past dozen years or so, newspaper circulation has been declining at the rate of one per cent a year while "traffic to the 26 most popular news sites in 2003 grew by 70% from May 2002 to October 2003," according to the comprehensive "State of the News Media 2004" report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. And few people are willing to surrender their credit card numbers in exchange for week-old news articles at $2.95 a pop.

Nevertheless, I think the most compelling motive for requiring registration is data mining. Granted that a certain proportion of visitors provide false information, registration does provide enormous fodder for targeted advertising and user profiling. It's not just an issue of cost and convenience. At bottom, it's an issue of privacy.

In a post on this topic a while back, I mentioned BugMeNot, a site "created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information." BugMeNot lets you "Bypass Compulsory Web Registration" by soliciting and maintaining a public database of phony logins.

Seeing at least the potential for an ethical quandary here, I was surprised by the one online comment and several private communications that praised BugMeNot as a welcome, collaborative, and effective antidote to the "repulsive registration bug." My compunctions obviously place me in the minority. Since my last visit, BugMeNot has supplemented its "slow but simple method" of accessing protected sites with an "advanced but fast" one. The site has also added more link buttons than I had noticed and generally adopted a bolder persona.

To the extent that BugMeNot succeeds in its mission, Dvorak's recommendation that print publications rethink their website model becomes more timely -- unless the data currently being mined from compliant registrants is even more valuable than we think.

Internet Speed?

Time has really flown by these past few weeks -- and nothing makes that clearer than the embarrasing realization that I haven't posted to Metaforix@ for over a month. Business travel, family commitments, and three full weeks of technology hell combined to keep me working more and writing less.

But I'm back, with a pent-up accumulation of things to say.