Davos Newbies

As a Wall Street Journal subscriber, I received an email telling me that I now had a personal page on WSJ.com. Clever, I thought, a WSJ version of Pageflakes or Netvibes. I wouldn’t use it, but it’s a good idea.

However, the Journal falls into the usual pit of old-style newspaper sites: we wouldn’t dare give you access to anyone else’s content. I can remix all sorts of WSJ content, but there’s no option to add other feeds. How could anyone with a brain who knows what an RSS feed is do such a thing?

Instead they could have provided the many WSJ.com subscribers their first glance of a new world of multiple information sources. Felix Salmon has even provided a helpful visual guide to the econoblogosphere that they could have shamelessly cribbed. A bad, missed opportunity, but one that could easily be rectified.