In a conversation yesterday with Chris Willis (co-author of We Media),
he came up with what I thought to be a profound observation. (Well,
Willis often does that.) Isn’t it interesting, he mused, that the same
people who are so reticent to provide websites with personal
information like age, address, phone number, e-mail address, etc. seem
comfortable with submitting quite personal information to
social-networking sites like MySpace.
Yeah, that is interesting. And to those media websites who demand
personal data in the form of mandatory user registration in order to
get access to otherwise-free content, perhaps you may want to rethink
that decision in light of Willis’ observation.
It would be so much more user-friendly, to use a dated term, to gather
demographic and personal-interest data from a social-networking
component of your site than to force it. Instead of trying to overcome
the natural reticence of the audience to give up personal data, why not
go with the flow and create services where people will share that
information naturally?
