February 7, 2007
It depends what the meaning of "permanent" is
The New York Times has generally cut down on the amount of material that it has available for free online. And when it's restricted material to the paid archive it generally hasn't given advanced notice. (Except IIRC when it changed the free archive from two weeks to one week.)
So recently I was very pleased when I noticed that the Times generated a Permalink that provided a permanent link as the pop up tells us:
To link to this article from your blog, copy and paste the url below into your blog or homepage. Using this link will ensure access to the article, even after it becomes part of the NYT archive.
Well I started using that a few weeks ago instead of relying on the RSS URL's that also keep an article out of the paid archive after a week. And now guess what happens. Check out this "permalink."
That's right. I'm in the paid archive. And it wasn't just one permalink. Every permalink I tried that was more than 1 week old sent me to the archive. (Except for reviews, which the Times has always allowed free access to.) The RSS URL's though didn't re-direct me to the archive.
So what's going on here? Is it a software error? Or did the Times pull the plug on the permalink experiment without telling us?
Blogdigger tags: New York Times, Permalink.
