The New York Times has yet another article on weblogs today. Page C6. Same old story. "Weblogs could be big, and maybe even important, but right now they all suck." They give the last work to some guy who used to blog, but stopped in favor of email. He says, "If you want to communicate with people, email it to them. Don't force them to come to your site every day..." That is ridiculous. There is much more force involved in an email list. It shows up in your in box whether you feel like reading it that day or not. Plus, it destroys the most important thing: archives. What good are all those emails? Who can ever get at that information? Emails just sit on people's hard drives until their systems crash or get thrown out.
The Times is so stubborn with the registration thing. But maybe there's a work around. How about a script that takes a Times URL as an argument, sets a NYTimes cookie valid for 10 minutes (or something short,) and then redirects you to the URL? So instead of linking to the Times directly, you'd link to
www.timesworkaround.com/?url=http://www.newyorktimes.com/realurl
You still have to accept a cookie, but it's not unique. And the real reason, of course, is so you can link to a Times story, and know that your reader will actually be taken to what you linked to, and not to some page where they are forced to create an account.
I would love to talk to someone at the Times who has access to that reader data. I'd eat my hat if more than 5% of it is accurate. I'll bet the email addresses are funny. Lots of 'yeahright@fuckyou.com' would be my guess. What the hell good could it be? Maybe they actually want less readers? Could be since the bandwidth is an expense and they make money selling the paper in real life.
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- jim 2-25-2002 5:53 pm
The Times is so stubborn with the registration thing. But maybe there's a work around. How about a script that takes a Times URL as an argument, sets a NYTimes cookie valid for 10 minutes (or something short,) and then redirects you to the URL? So instead of linking to the Times directly, you'd link to
www.timesworkaround.com/?url=http://www.newyorktimes.com/realurl
You still have to accept a cookie, but it's not unique. And the real reason, of course, is so you can link to a Times story, and know that your reader will actually be taken to what you linked to, and not to some page where they are forced to create an account.
I would love to talk to someone at the Times who has access to that reader data. I'd eat my hat if more than 5% of it is accurate. I'll bet the email addresses are funny. Lots of 'yeahright@fuckyou.com' would be my guess. What the hell good could it be? Maybe they actually want less readers? Could be since the bandwidth is an expense and they make money selling the paper in real life.
- jim 2-25-2002 6:04 pm