Sunday, July 25, 2004

harshing marketing's mellow, one site at a time

Check out BugMeNot's 'compulsory' registration form... satire and irony and social commentary all on one web page. And you thought all the web was good for was pictures of nekkid people.

This company has liberated almost 17000 websites that require registration before you can view them... having their bookmarklet on my browser's toolbar reduces the amount of bullshit I need to go through to get information from the web. (There's also now a Firefox extension [and a great tutorial on how to make such extensions] over at Roachfiend.)

If companies are going to put something on the web, they should just put it on the web. Making you sign up so they can better target their advertisements at you is bullshit... marketing profiles ultimately just dehumanize. Any spanner in the works of the marketing machine has my support.

An earlier post has more information on bookmarklets in general plus one to get you into New York Times articles without filling out any forms.