I agree; this is bad news. I read about it in the print edition of The Post last week and was really disappointed. I'll go there less if the barriers to entry are bigger, and I don't think I'm alone. There must be better ways for them to gather data needed to increase ad revenue. Maybe not, but it just seems like they'll lose a lot of readers who won't want to deal with the hassle of registering and logging in. But when every paper does it eventually, I'll have to register somewhere, so I'm sure it could work out fine for The Post and other papers in the end.

Microsoft Passport does what you're talking about ... Personally, I'm happy enough not to centralize all of my data. I'd rather the Post just think that I'm a female data analyst from Cleveland.

Still, it does suck. I hope they don't start charging for archived articles like the Times does.

In fact, they do their own idiosyncratic forms so they don't have to pay the centralized data bank people for the demographic info on who surfs what that drives their advertising. But since surfing is indeed putting newspapers in financial jeopardy, it's a smallish price to pay for the papers to even stay in business.

I'm not really all that happy about the net becoming quite the capitalist marketplace that it's become, but this is just one more little sign.

You may know that you lie in statistically predictable ways, and that they expect you to do so. Thus your demographics are known stochastically.

The Post's "This will only take a few minutes" form seemed so erratic (I sort of assumed its appearance was random, actually), I can't help but hope the new drive for reader information -- or disinformation -- goes the same way. Alas, looks like I'll be doing my part to contribute to another market analysis. Dang.