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The Wall Street Journal launches its own RSS reader

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman

From the Micro Persuasion blog, I learned today of the Wall Street Journal's new online tools. (Note that the online WSJ is a paid service.) 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.