I spend rather a lot of time reading and commenting upon blogs. I’m also part of various different community website’s. One thing that has struck me is the huge difference in registration complexity between sites.
Take this morning for instance – Garett Rogers had an interesting little post over on ZDNet about a new Gmail iGoogle gadget. As a user of Gmail for hosted domains, I can’t enjoy the full breadth of functionality of iGoogle (I can’t for example use reader with my hosted domain – I therefore use it with another Google login) and I really wanted to comment as such. I typed a pithy little comment, hit post and was greeted by this;
Sorry but I am not going to fill in a multi-field, multi-part registration to leave a simple comment.
This begs lots of questions around single sign-on and federation of registration across services – but it also tells us one thing – any barrier to participation is a bad thing.
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. 
The ZDNet Obstacle Course, or Eating One’s Own Dog Food…
Michael Krigsman tends to be critical all the time. Not that he’s mean, but what else can you do when your blog title is IT Project Failures ?
Today’s he’s getting his own dog food served up, in nice bite-sized portions . After poking…