BugMeNot
I recently discovered the BugMeNot.com
website. The people at BugMeNot have come up with a fabulous idea.
Quoting their website:
This service is especially useful for reading news from Google News, a service that automatically searches through approximately 4,500 news sources (see my article on Google News). I have found Google News to be a refreshing alternative to biased news sources. Although the articles still come from traditional sources, they pull together related articles from various sources "enabling you to see how different news organizations are reporting the same story." Since getting the news from this source typically entails visiting multiple online newspapers, a user typically encounters numerous registration requests. I started using this Google service when I first learned of it and practically abandoned it as more online newspapers joined the registration bandwagon. It took far too long to register for newspapers that often only contained one article of interest. However, with BugMeNot, the process is much faster.
Before temporarily abandoning Google News as a source, I did register for some online news sites I thought were reputable. One such site was the LA Times. Luckily I did so with a disposable email address and by doing so learned that registering with the LA Times does result in spam. I quickly disposed of that address.
A service I recently discovered that is helpful if BugMeNot doesn't have an ID for a website is Mailinator. Mailinator provides one-time use email addresses with no registration.
BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic informationTo use the service, first add this BugMeNot Bookmarklet (learn more about Bookmarklets). When you come across a website that requires registration, you simply activate the Bookmarklet and it will offer you a user name and password. The way this works is that users of BugMeNot register on various sites and add their fake registrations to BugMeNot. If you like using the service, I suggest you do the same.
This service is especially useful for reading news from Google News, a service that automatically searches through approximately 4,500 news sources (see my article on Google News). I have found Google News to be a refreshing alternative to biased news sources. Although the articles still come from traditional sources, they pull together related articles from various sources "enabling you to see how different news organizations are reporting the same story." Since getting the news from this source typically entails visiting multiple online newspapers, a user typically encounters numerous registration requests. I started using this Google service when I first learned of it and practically abandoned it as more online newspapers joined the registration bandwagon. It took far too long to register for newspapers that often only contained one article of interest. However, with BugMeNot, the process is much faster.
Before temporarily abandoning Google News as a source, I did register for some online news sites I thought were reputable. One such site was the LA Times. Luckily I did so with a disposable email address and by doing so learned that registering with the LA Times does result in spam. I quickly disposed of that address.
A service I recently discovered that is helpful if BugMeNot doesn't have an ID for a website is Mailinator. Mailinator provides one-time use email addresses with no registration.
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