I have a new favorite web site for the week – www.bugmenot.com. I learned about it from Time Magazine.

Bugmenot.com is a place to share username and passwords for web sites that require them – but don’t requirement payment. The Minneapolis newspaper is one example. To access more than one story, the Star Tribune now requires registration – as do many other newspapers, such as the NY Times, Washington Post, and others.

To get the username and password, you simply visit bugmenot.com, submit the URL of the web site in question, and if there is an account available and registered with bugmenot.com, they will tell you the username and password to use. If there isn’t an account set up, then you are invited to set up a fake account and register it with bugmenot.com.

I would not promote this site for paid sites, or for sites where they use your registration to customize your experience, but plenty of sites just seem to require registration for commercial purposes – registration doesn’t enhance the experience. In those cases, I’m going to go with bugmenot.com.