NYTimes permalinks
Next time you want to link to a New York Times article on your blog or want to bookmark it for future reference, you no longer have to rely on a bookmarklet to generate a permanent link. On each article page, there is now a Share link that reveals links to some sites plus the possibility of obtaining a permanent link to the piece.
The automatic link options are to Digg, Facebook and Newswine. What curious choices. I would love to know what went into those decisions, possible deals or whatnot. Digg users seem mostly interested in tech news so while it may make sense to have a quick link to that service on science and technology pieces, it doesn’t make sense on other sections of the NYTimes site. The idea suggested on The Mu Life about different links depending on the part of the site makes sense. And where are quick links to Reddit, Netscape, Yahoo My Web and del.icio.us, just to name a few. Has the Facebook user demographic changed significantly in recent months away from college students? If not (and I haven’t heard of any such significant changes) then why assume that users of that system would be most likely to want to bookmark and share NYTimes articles?
In any case, the good news is that they had the sense to create a permalink option that you can use to add the page to the social bookmarking site of your choice, which would be del.icio.us in my case thanks to its automated post-to-blog feature.
December 15th, 2006 at 9:20 am
It’s nice to see permalink there and hopefully (being that this is the NYTimes) this trend will spread to other news sites. CNN is especially bad about archiving news stories.
To your original point, the Facebook is a curious choice, especially when the bookmark feature is pretty new. I wonder what percentage of Facebook activities are bookmarking. My hunch is pretty low.
Snubbing del.icio.us and the others doesn’t make sense. They could easily customize it, too, so that you could check which of the social sharing services you want to show.
December 16th, 2006 at 10:27 am
The marketing team of NYTimes has been pushing the paper to college students for some time. Besides providing subscription at reduced rates to students they also advertise this option heavily on campuses. (for example by rercuiting PolScience and Sociology professor to announce this option.) NYTimes is fully aware that newspaper reading habits form early and last a long time. They are trying to reach those who did not develop this habit under parental roof, so they would do it during their formative colleage years. I suspect linking to Facebook is part of this marketing strategy. Making the paper more relevant, closer, and clickable for the college age crowd. Sell more on the long term.
By “paper” nowadays I don’t necessarily mean of course the physical object, but the content of the NYTimes.