• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, December 11, 2006

The NYTimes.com today unveiled a new Web 2.0-ish feature designed to encourage users to spread the paper's stories. Alongside links to e-mail, print or save articles, the Times has added links enabling readers to post articles to social media sites including Digg and Facebook.

The move probably can't hurt, but neither does it position the Times as an online innovator. Consider, the Washington Post added Technorati links to its stories, allowing readers to see what bloggers said about the articles, more than one year ago. The Post--and a host of other online news sites--also previously rolled out Digg links, as well as links to social bookmarking site del.ic.ious and networking site Facebook, among others.

The blog TechCrunch praises what it calls the "begrudging move," saying that with the new features, the online Times "exposes itself to far more reader interaction" than in the past. That is, by encouraging readers to spread articles to sites like Digg, the paper is willing to risk users commenting on articles in venues it doesn't control.

At the same time, even without an assist from the Times, readers have been submitting the NYTimes.com stories to Digg and other sites for a long time now. In fact, the executives running the Times must surely realize the paper already is among the most scrutinized, commented-upon publications on the Web. It's hard to imagine that making it easy for readers to submit the articles to social news sites will significantly change the paper's online fortunes.