If you've ever done a Google search and have been led to a newspaper's website - only to find out that the site you never expect to revisit requires a length registration process - then you may enjoy visiting BugMeNot.com. The webmaster of this site thinks it's wrong to require registration to get access to info that should be public, so he's gone about registering (with the help of friends) at almost 100,000 sites. Visitors to BugMeNot.com can get the username and passwords to log directly into these websites.
Among other things, BugMeNot.com can save you time. Sometimes registration can be lengthy, involving entering your address and usually requiring you to check your email. It would be cool if Google could partner with BugMeNot.com to allow us to link directly, but that would be a legally dangerous move for Google.
(Consider this site as a possible resource, but there's no garrantee that the usernames and passwords will work forever. Savvy sites like the New York Times probably check the usernames and passwords linked to their site and terminate those accounts.)
According to BugMeNot.com's webmaster:
BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).
Here are his reasons against websites practice of unnecessarily using registration:
It's a breach of privacy. Sites don't have a great track record with the whole spam thing. It's contrary to the fundamental spirit of the net. (Just ask Google.) It's pointless due to the significant percentage of users who enter fake demographic details anyway. It's a waste of time. It's annoying. Imagine if every site required registration to access content.
And here is my opinion...
The modern web is becoming more and more open, meaning that websites like Google open up their technology so that others can make use of it (see GoogleMapsMania for an example). If this is true - and I think it is - then why are so many websites locking their information behind unnecessary site registration pages?
Newspaper websites are notorious for this. I wonder if site registration is a contributing factor to why newspaper circulation continues to decline. Not being able to keep up with the news is another, since blogs effectively spread information much faster. Said another way, not only are newspapers becoming obsolete, but their websites they created to try to stay more timely and relevant are also becoming more and more obsolete in their current form.
This is why you see some websites porting all or part of their reporting over to blogs. By the way, the St. Petersburg Times is an example of a newspaper that has done a great job modernizing their reporting via blogs. On the other hand, an example of a newspaper website that is not user-friendly is the Orlando Sentinel. Not only do they require registration, but they Orlando Sentinel doesn't archive their stories very well so Google searches leading to their website often end up with a "page not found" error. Grrr!
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Posted by: Nina | March 05, 2013 at 05:17 AM