All Aboard The Technological Revolution

fm6 writes "Our old friends at nytimes.com (click here to tell them how much traffic their silly registration system costs them) have a short but thought-provoking interview with economic historian John Gordon Steele. He compares the economic effect of the Internet to various other technological revolutions, especially the introduction of steam power in the early 19th century."

Comments

It's about time!

[daniel_isaacs]

THis post is not a response to the referenced article. If that bothers you, I don't care.

It's about time the Eds. started posting the Bitch link for NYT. in the NYT stories. They really don't understand how little their reg. system is helping them vs. hurting them. Even if only a fe K. /.'ers drop them a note, they'll get the message.

Let's just hope they do something about it. I'm getting sick of going the extra step to get to the articles.

lameness?

[negativekarmanow tm]

post #2223259
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My posted "suggestion"

[KhaliF]

I really hate their stupid registration system, so I had a rant at them:

Your registration system is annoying. I would read articles linked in by other sources (and thereby increase your viewership) if it weren't for this silly system.

I personally find it disgusting that I would have to give up the privacy of anonymity to simply read the content of your site! It's not like I have to pay you when I sign up - I could give completely false information and make a fake account.

The things is that I'm not keen to circumvent your registration process by providing false information, because it seems more and more likely these days that exercising prudent anonymity (even spam protection, a false email address) may result in a prosecution for "Circumventing a copyright measure"...

In fact, some overzealous young legal mind is likely to pick up on this and say it's "Fraud" to provide your site false information too.

Where does it end? Please - bring down your site's towered walls... What possible advantage do you gain by collecting all this information? Is it moral to collect the information when the only useful purpose of it would be spam??

I know you may want demographics, user profiles, etc... But requiring the full identity of some casual browser is bound to turn him/her off your site.

My posted feedback

[mrBlond]

Please remove the registration requirement.

"Customer registration forms are the bane of attracting new customers. It's like posting an armed guard at the door to a department store and only letting people in the store after they show two forms of ID and suffer nosy questions about their family tree. Web users often turn away rather than having to register. Quite simply, it's not worth peoples' time to answer all your questions... users will resent being asked to register. Every click is a burden for busy Web users, but more important, users don't like parting with their personal data before they have developed a sense of trust in the site... Qualitative studies have long shown that customer registration hurts usability and makes users turn away... Marie Tahir from Intuit... Too-early customer registration requirement posed a major problem in the earlier version of the site. After this finding, the site was redesigned to allow users to enter valuable areas of the site without having to register. Registration was postponed to a later stage where it was truly necessary to know the user's personal data in order to provide a mortgage. As a result, usage doubled." - Jakob Nielsen