Digg founder Kevin Rose announced that Digg buttons will now be available on the Wall Street Journal website (WSJ.com). Not only that, but anyone will have free access to any WSJ articles visited via Digg. Coincidentally, this news comes around the same time Rupert Murdoch suggested that he might take down the Wall Street Journal’s online subscription pay wall. Whatever the circumstances, I’m a daily user of both sites and welcome the collaboration.
In fact, here’s a walk through of how the integration looks and works:
The Digg button is located in two locations, top right just above the main advertisement and bottom center below the article (see screenshots below).
The submit window is similar to the one you’d see at the NYTimes.com. But what seems like more of a new feature is the window that pops up after you’ve submitted. It shows one column of the recently popular stories from the WSJ.com on Digg and another column of upcoming WSJ stories on Digg (see screenshots below).
It’s still unclear how exactly the respective sites keep track of making content free. But it looks like the url used for the submission via the WSJ site creates a url that is different than what you’d see from regular browsing of the WSJ site. Again, however they do it is fine with me. The WSJ.com is an excellent source of news and is one step closer to being accessible by the masses.
The Wall Street Journal web site looks at the “referer” header to determine where the link the user is requesting came from (the previous web site). If it begins with “http://digg.com”, then they show the page for free – even if it’s part of the paid content.
It’s a very week form of security that can be easily spoofed. It seems that the WSJ is pretty close to giving up on a subscribers only area.
does anyone mind digging every article from everyday at the WSJ.
that would be great for me.
I think the deal is as much about Digg as it is about the Journal. The traffic impact or Digg, especially if the Journal were to go free would be major. As I wrote on my blog today, access to an additional 15 million visitors would definitely change Digg’s status.
Wow, this is awaome news about the collaboration!
Also, glad to see WSJ finally doing away with the online charge! Very good news, indeed.
thanks for the GREAT post! Very useful…
This enabled me to create a proxy that allows reading all WSJ articles for free :
http://mediastech.com/index.php/2007/11/read-wsjcom-for-free/
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce