Following up on my recent post about Required Registration, I saw this post on Slashdot today. This is the part that caught my attention.

Customers avoid intrusive practices; although this story was written by the Washington Post and I have the URL to the original story available, I declined to link to washingtonpost.com because of their intrusive registration.

I am seeing this bypassing of registration systems more and more.

I am not talking about using services such as Bug Me Not, I am talking about patience or other means. One common form is to link to the Google cache of the page (which since stored on Google's servers, bypasses the need for registration).

In the age of syndication and sharing content between papers with the same corporate parents it is only a matter of time before an article written by one paper appears on another's site. This is the case with the article mentioned in Slashdot. The Washington Post originally had the article, but it was republished in the San Francisco Gate. The Post has a strict registration policy, the Gate does not. So guess who gets the page views and ad impressions? Need to read it NOW, well then register, if you can wait a few minutes, hours or maybe a day, then you can save some privacy.

This is the same as my earlier situation. If I wanted to read the Zook article I would have to register at the Gainesville Sun, or wait 10 minutes and read it on CNNSI.com.