Fairfax becoming more social
Jul 22, 2009 Media & Advertising
In the morning I like to read The Age website rather than purchasing the dead tree edition. The paper has far more articles than the website but it is in an incredibly inconvenient format, especially for someone like myself who travels a lot but still wants to know what is going on at home. I also find with the paper edition that almost all of the interesting international news I have already picked up via the internet, often several days before it appears in the paper.
The point of this post however is the interesting social sidebar (pictured left) which now appears on some of the articles on the fairfax newspaper articles, such as this one. It tells you how many people are currently viewing the article, which other articles these people have read, and allows you to post a comment about the page on twitter. It’s creating a unique ascii string for people to include in their twitter post which ties it back to the relevant article. For the travel article I linked above the string is #fd-drcd, where I presume the fd is for fairfax digital.
I’m curious to know whether they are getting any feedback on the articles via this system (although the posts I checked didn’t have any), and also why it only appears on some articles and not all of them. If anybody has any additional info I’d be keen to hear it.
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