The Stupidity of The Age For those who don't know, The Age is a newspaper here in Melbourne. Recently I sent in an application to become the paper's editor, but after what I've discovered today I'm glad they didn't take me up on that offer. There's no way I would now want to be professionally associated with that gang of imbeciles.

So much spleen - but why? Well, despite it being a crap newspaper, The Age has a rather good website. Most of the annoyances of the paper version are gone leaving you free to read the selection of articles. However, this year the good people at The Age decided to ask its readers to register on the website. Soon the entire site will only be available to registered users. The reason for the change is so they can get more bucks out of their advertising partners by giving them more detailed demographic information about their readers.

The upshot of this is you'll need a username and password to read the site, and everything you do read will be used to make up a profile of you, and then they will start pumping ads at you for things they think you specifically will want to buy.

Well, that's guaranteed to make me not bother with them anymore. Bye bye The Age - I'll stick with Google News from now on. Google News will destroy you because you treat your users like morons, whereas Google will let us read whatever we want without any targetted demographic marketing bullshite.  ¶ 1:30 PM