Grey Lady gets all jiggy with Digg
The New York Times has rolled out some social-networking and/or social-bookmarking features, with a small widget that appears next to stories and allows readers to submit them to Digg and Newsvine, or bookmark them with Facebook and delicious.
For some reason, TechCrunch has chosen to call this “surrendering” to social news. “This seems like a begrudging move for The Times, a paper with an elitist reputation and a crossword puzzle that you need a PhD to solve. A social networking site like Facebook doesn’t seem the type of company that The Times would consort with,” writes Natali del Conte.
Maybe so, but I think it’s a pretty smart tie-in to those social tools. Not to blow the Globe and Mail horn, but as I mentioned to George Scriban over at Global Nerdy, the Globe has had similar links to Digg, Newsvine, Magnolia and Technorati for several months now. If you click on the words “share this” at the top of a story, you get a little Ajaxified menu of social tools.
As Greg Sterling at Screenwerk notes, “These days you can’t survive with only a “destination” strategy. You have to have some sort of viral and/or other distribution strategies to get your content in front of users.” The Times is also creating a permalink URL for all stories, which makes it easier to link to them. Om Malik says it’s all about the page views — and Seamus McCauley of Virtual Economics notes that unless the NYT has more of a strategy than they are letting on, these deals are just giving away the store.
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(On Dec 11th, 2006 at 4:48 am)
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