I’ve been visiting a lot of newspaper sites lately for research purposes. What I’m noticing is that they’re making you give up (so they think) demographic data as well as an e-mail address. You’ve also got to supply a password for some.
You’ve got to be kidding me. With spam on the rise and other ‘Net atrocities, why would anyone plug in “factual” information?
So I give up the false ID. The same one for every site. Unless someone’s beaten me to it and the site verifies an e-mail with one already in its database.
I guess the new capital on the Internet is information – the bigger your database the richer you are.