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Washingtonpost.com Wants Identities of Posters
mytrip recommends a News.com account of a panel discussion in which the Washington Post's online executive editor Jim Brady argued against anonymity on his site. He's welcome to try to carve out a space for civilized discourse, but it seems that he can't help alienating the Net-savvy whenever he opens his mouth to speak of it. "... he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards — and if need be — automatically kick them off for good. ... Brady also lamented that closing user accounts doesn't keep bad eggs off a site. They just come back and create new ones ... Brady believes that in the next five years people will be required to identify themselves in some way at many sites. 'I don't know whether we do it with a credit card number, a driver's license or passport ...'"
Nah--they'll just go back to the "Making shit up" school of journalism."
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
he's not wanting just registration, he's after complete identification of the person, so that you can't just keep registering new names, something that shouldn't happen, since the only way to do it would basically require people to have a license to use the internet (or at least post on it). [note that this doesn't really require a license, but registration with a central authority where you'd give some kind of personally identifying information, which as we know could NEVER be abused].
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I know you're just joking... but online polls still wouldn't be scientific. Preventing people from voting multiple times is only part of the problem. Self-selection is a big problem, too: the people who chose to vote on a given topic will usually have some statistical bias in their opinion of that topic. Truly scientific polls require sampling randomly from the target demographic.
There is also the problem of getting people to vote honestly. This is of course a problem with offline polls, too. (Conceivably, though, people take online polls less seriously than offline polls, and thus lie more frequently...)
You really must have some form of user moderation. Slashdot is one example, but I know it confuses less savvy folks. The Houston Chronicle has finally gotten what I think is a reasonable and yet simple recommendation system ( http://www.chron.com/ ). It's amazing how I've come to expect user comments after stories. Sometimes they're even quite informative, insightful, or whatever. Sometimes in local news the people involved or witnesses may even post about inaccuracies in the article.
expandfairuse.org
Does he think he has no competition? If they require "real id" and other sites don't, then that's where the traffic will go. I'm already skipping news sites that require registration. I'm sure he remembers what that transition was like. Maybe he thinks he can wear us down with incremental changes. That is truly clueless, because he'll never get to where he wants to go. You were right about charging a fee,. That would identify most people, and it would probably be more successful than just asking for my CC number and not charging it, which seems damn suspicious. Just say, "we need $5 a year", and see how many people bite without thinking of privacy.... oh, and good luck with that ;-)
BTW, those bastards are letting the googlebot freely roam their pages, but when a user follows the resulting link, he's slapped with the registration page. It's dishonest if you ask me. I don't even click on a New York Times link anymore. Mind you, I know I can just select the googlebot in my User Agent Switcher and get right in, but I don't need them to get the news, and I want them to know that.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
A) The newspaper under discussion here is the Washington Post, not the New York Times.
B) The Times dropped their registration required policy some time ago.