Internet interaction ; Website visitors have different ideas of America's Best.(AutoWeek car survey)(Brief Article)

For each of the past dozen years we've mailed paper surveys to a random 1 percent of our audience, but this year we added something different by including a version of the America's Best survey on our website at www.autoweek.com. Full detailed results of our web poll will be posted on the site at around the time of this issue's cover date.

For a number of reasons, responses to this year's electronic survey are being tabulated separately from the results of the paper poll, which are

reflected in the accompanying stories. What reasons?

AutoWeek magazine readers comprise a passionate, loyal, car-centric group whose demography, whose personality we have well documented. They are the car experts whose opinion we seek.

The Internet world, on the other hand, is wide open. Though a good number of our readers are computer knowledgeable, and though the

software exists for us to qualify web page viewers as subscribers to the magazine, we don't yet have in place a means of allowing only our subscribers to vote on the website. Until we can qualify which voters at www.autoweek.com are AutoWeek subscribers (so that we know the

ballot box isn't being stuffed by, say, the marketing and public relations staffs of auto companies), we're going to stick with polling the most passionate audience we know: paid subscribers to our ...