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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 smile_tongue. After poking fun at Bill Gate’s Byzantine Web Experience at Microsoft.com, one of the first comments he received by a fellow Enterprise Irregular was:

Michael
Good thing that Bill Gates hasn’t tried to comment on the ZDNET blogs.
Imagine that rant…!-)

Ouch… but he is so right. ZDNet has built a hard-to-penetrate comment wall that deters most from entering the conversation. Anyway, the story gets better. Michael received the following email from his own Mother:

I DECIDED TO BE BRAVE AND ENTER A COMMENT OF MY OWN, BUT I DID NOT GET VERY
FAR. HAVING TYPED MY THING, I FOUND MYSELF WITH A FORM TO FILL OUT, A
SEEMINGLY VERY SIMPLE TASK. LITTLE DID I KNOW THAT IN THE WORLD YOU
INHABIT, EVEN FORMS DON’T SPEAK MY KIND OF ENGLISH. I WAS REJECTED OUT OF
HAND BECAUSE I COULDN’T FIGURE OUT WHERE TO ENTER ZIP CODE!!! LIKE A DOG
CHEWING ON A BONE, THE FORM WOULDN’T LET ME GO, INSISTING ON THE ZIP CODE.
AFTER TRYING AND TRYING, I FINALLY GAVE UP…… THE FORM IS PROBABLY STILL
LAUGHING NOW.

FAILURE TO FIND A PLACE FOR THIS PIECE OF INFORMATION WAS NEW TO ME, ONE WHO
IS USED TO MEET WITH OTHER FAILURES REGULARLY. BUT TO FAIL TO COMPLETE MY
ADDRESS? WHAT GIVES?

Beware of a Mother’s wrath .smile_omg Joke apart, Michael’s Mom must be quite frustrated, as shown by the all-CAPS.

Jeff Nolan’s more analytical opinion on the EI discussion group:

Actually that ZDNet comment wall is a legitimate example for a post on how complex systems that deviate from community norms discourage participation which in the end frustrate the objectives of the host.

We hear this left and right. Not only from readers, but from some ZDNet bloggers as well. And while at it, let me quickly admit I was guilty of building an obstacle course myself – although nothing as discouraging as ZDNet’s wall. And to be fair, today’s criticism isn’t directed at Michael, but ZDNet’s management.

I can’t resist (mis)quoting President Ronald Reagan’s famous words :

Mr. Gorbachev , [insert ZDNet Exec here] open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev , [ZDNet Exec] tear down this wall!

Read also: Please make it easy for people ZDNet….

Comments

  1. Lovely post…

  2. Brilliant Zoli and with a poignancy you can only appreciate if you’ve walked through the Brandenburg Gate.

  3. you just reminded me to turn my captcha back on…:)

  4. Vinnie, I spared you in this post, don’t you dare!
    🙂

  5. ZDNet Product Management Here, absbestos suit donned.

    First of all, I’d selfishly prefer that you write blogs about ZDNet and link to it rather than log in and comment.

    However, we’d certainly like everyone to also register and comment, and not everyone has a blog. So, why do we make it so damn hard?

    Dennis has heard my arguments in private but there’s no secret. We make money from registering users and registered users get our email newsletters, which bring people back to the site.

    We have to balance those benefits against the benefits of having more peopele comment, which is free and sometimes terrific content. For me, that’s a business trade-off. For Dennis and our other excellent writers, the trade-off has a lot less balanced. They don’t share in the money from registrations and though they get traffic from those newsletters they can’t quantify it. However they can see how many comments they get — or don’t get — and they know one major reason is the reg wall.

    (As for his mother; that’s a bug. We have a ZIP code field, and we’re not sure why she couldn’t find it.)

  6. Stephen, Thanks for sharing the reasoning behind the comment wall, which of course we’ve discussed before.

    You made a clear statement of the trade-off between the registration economics and the number of comments, from both the ZDNet and blogger/user perspectives.

    Watching my own blog stats, there’s absolutely no denying the power of the ZDNet newsletters. At the same time, more comments also means more love, page views, discussion, and so on.

    Many ZDNet bloggers are routinely asked (often on Twitter) about the comment wall. Here are some examples:

    http://summize.com/search?max_id=843517667&page=1&q=zdnet+comment

    Isn’t there some way to retain the economic benefits while making the whole thing easier for users?

  7. Another ZDNet product person weighing in… Just today, I was working on our technical spec with a colleague for a tiered registration process for ZDNet. While the details aren’t finalized, it is my hope that by the end of the summer, folks wanting to post a Talkback comment will need to provide *far* less information than they do today — perhaps just selecting a user name, password, and giving us their e-mail address.

    We’re hoping this will help to balance our business needs with the desire of our users to comment without needing to provide us with everything short of social security and checking account numbers.

  8. Josh, May a thousand years of sunshine rain down warmth on you and yours.

  9. Stephen and Josh,

    Thanks for commenting her so fast ( I guess getting through was easy.. LOL). Just two quickies from the tweets Michael linked to:

    – yourdon: they want my address? My phone #? What are they – the KGB? I just wanted to was leave a comment, not register for life

    – esjewett: comment wall is way high: 17 required registration fields, four email lists by default. No thanks. I like the blog though!

    Yes, I get the point about monetization, and to some extent may even agree that knowing reader demographics helps. I’d question the value of the data though… I know I hate filling out such forms, and I often enter bogus data just to get through fast.

    The solution Josh mentions sounds like a perfect compromise to me.

    Again, thanks for commenting here.

  10. @zoli – I made sure they knew about the post – and its genesis. 🙂

  11. same story at cnet. why should be people allowed to comment freely?

  12. Vinnie, you’re captcha is back on! has it ever been off?

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  1. […] The ZDNet Obstacle Course, or Eating One’s Own Dog Food| Zoli’s Blog – Zoli does it like no other – brilliant. Even if it does mean sticking it to one of my customers […]

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