Friday, January 11, 2008

Must Register

You now have to register to read articles for the nytimes.com. To be honest, I'm not sure if it's all articles, but I know if you'd like to read an opinion piece you have to register. Also, it could be that you had to register all this time and that I had registered in a previous life and somehow had a cookie that saved my information. Though I'm pretty sure I've never registered before.

Don't worry, it's free. Well, kind of a free. You do have to give away some personal information, but that often comes with the territory.

They asked for my household income, zip code, country I live in (why didn't they just use my zip code?), age, profession and sex. Being my wife and I just had a child, for the question on "sex" I said "not in some time."

Anyway, I found out about the "must register" a few days ago. I got a bit perturbed and went elsewhere for the day's news. Maybe it's just that I'm in a better mood today, or the fact that I really like their product. I registered.

The nytimes.com is a nice product. I don't feel bad about registering for it. Though I don't think every news website could get away asking people to register. My feeling is, if you have a great product you can get away with asking people for personal information. It's basically the product's price. If your product sucks, then you'll never get people to spend two minutes telling you about themselves.

How do you feel about registering for online content?

4 comments:

bosshart said...

I did this a while ago. You will soon recieve junk mail from the new york times.

Mac Noland said...

Well that is not encouraging. Looks like I'll have to modify my SPAM filter.

bosshart said...

No, not junk email. Junk mail, as in paper. However, its worth it. Did you read the "Women are never front runners" article? You should do a post on it.

Mac Noland said...

Are you serious! I'll patiently await the junk in my box. It will go along nicely with the offers to Playboy I get.

As for the "Woman are never Front-Runners" article. That is very interesting though I pretty much disagree with her 100%. "I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman." One should not vote for Hillary because she's a woman. One should not vote for Obama because he's black. One should not vote for McCain because he's white. You vote for people who will be good leaders. If people vote on sex or race, then their idiots and should have their voting cards taken away.

Maybe I'll have to blog on it!