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.

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.

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?

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.)