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Wall Street Journal launches its own RSS reader

September 19, 2006

Rafe Needleman at Cnet News.com, courtesy of Steve Rubel, reports The Wall Street Journal launched its own RSS reader.

…Unlike the New York Times, which has launched its own news reader application, the WSJ is tweaking its online offering by adding cool tools like a right-mouse-click function that lets you quickly search the WSJ archives on any word you read in a story, without losing your place on the page. Very useful for doing research.

Also, there’s a beta My WSJ front page that’s really just a pre-customized RSS reader site. Like Original Signal, which publishes preconfigured ‘metagator’ sites, and like NetVibes, which lets you customize the feeds on your personal home page, the new My WSJ displays RSS feeds from different sections of the paper (U.S. News, Market News, etc). You can even add your own favorite RSS feeds to the page. Hovering over a story displays the first part of the text.

Unlike the Times’ application, these WSJ’s experiments don’t make the news prettier, but the custom ‘My WSJ’ front page is smart, since it lets information junkies get just the news they want without having to go to another company’s aggregation site. Traditionalists can stick with the main WSJ.com site.

Understand that readers of the WSJ are not limited to WSJ news with this RSS reader. They’ll be able to pick up RSS feeds from any blog, including those from law firms and other professional service firms. That’s like having the firm’s old hard copy newsletters inserted into the WSJ’s of your target audience. Only better.

Notwithstanding Microsoft’s failure to get its RSS solutions to the market as promised, RSS is becoming a big deal.

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