In the previous post, I linked to Kevin Rose’ post about the WSJ.com adding a Digg button to the bottom of pages throughout the site. Obviously, the real news in Kevin’s blog post is that every story that is “dugg” becomes “free” if accessed through Digg. In other words, if you’ve ever wanted to link to a WSJ.com story but couldn’t because you didn’t have a subscription — or you don’t link to articles that most people can’t access, you now have a hole through their paywall. This means that people like me, who have never before clicked on a Digg button, will be doing lots of clicking (I have a subscription) so I can help the WSJ.com executives “free” WSJ.com while not really “flipping the switch” immediately.
You also have a way to get the “free” headlines delivered to you via RSS.
As Digg offers an RSS feed of search terms, I tried out a search for the term WSJ.com with the “sort-newest-first” option selected. With an RSS feed of that search result you can, well, do all the RSS tricks you want. For example, in addition to the obvious thing you can do — add it to an RSS newsreader — you can display WSJ.com headlines on your Google/ig (or iGoogle) page (or the gazillion other Ajaxy personalized home pages out there) like this:
I’d really rather be sending any traffic directly to WSJ.com and not to Digg. If, for example, they started their journey to free by removing the paywall-filter from several of their category RSS feeds….
November 14th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Sitening (www.sitening.com) created a Digg feed that I use in Google Reader to bypass the Digg landing pages and link directly to the story, but digg might have changed their formatting, perhaps throwing off the parsing, because a certain percentage of links don’t work anymore. Clever folks at Sitening, how about a WSJ direct-to-story Digg feed?
November 15th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Great suggestion and great post. I think it reasons like this that the Journal went after this arrangement with Digg. And don’t get me wrong, the potential traffic boost for digg is nothing to laugh at.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
[...] Related rexblog flashback: “How to get an RSS feed with tons of ‘free’ stories on WSJ.com“ [...]