I think anything is fine provided it’s opted for clearly and consciously by the individual, and at his or her discretion.

The problem with selling data to publishers is the common motivation on the publishers’ side, which is to sell that data to advertisers who in turn spam the users. We want to get past that cycle.

All suggestions welcome, however.

If full disclosure were offered up front, (and if the data were not used for marketing) do you think it would be sleazy for the the data to be aggregated and sold to the publishers as a revenue model?

I just got off the phone with Bruce, who is a good and gracious guy. In respect to the problems I experienced (Shava too), what we did was uncover a bug in the survey system, which they are fixing.

While it’s true that Forbes was looking for responses from large companies, it’s also true that there are many ways to slice that interest, and many ways to characterize what’s being looked for.

In my own case, it should be of interest to Forbes (and some of its surveys) that I play relevant roles at some large companies (and at one or two large universities); but that those roles are not illuminated by questions about title, or even by the number of employees at the organization(s).

Anyway, Bruce is clearly interested in improving Forbes’ work here.

And more conversations will ensue.

Making a shift to transparency and openness is not just good for democracy, it is good for business.

Hey, I’m only a *future* captain of industry (or its successors). But it did feel a bit abrupt and rude.

I mean, geez, we just incorporated and got our first angel funding.

Guess Forbes just isn’t Entrepreneur and wants us to know it?

Though it’s a common old media approach, how about addressing subscribers by their real name to show how important they really are?