Ask Dave Taylor: Tech and Business

Wednesday

How do you link to temporary Web pages?

Rick Bruner, a trusted business colleague, emailed me a pointer to an article on blog search engines published by the Wall Street Journal, with a caveat that the link would only work for seven days before the article was pushed into the paid member archive. I'm a paid subscriber, so I don't much worry about that, but he also told me something I hadn't realized that won't mean anything to you unless you too are a subscriber: the "email this story" URL is actually a publicly accessible link.

When I cite the Wall Street Journal, I include the link to the story itself -- not using the "email this story" URL -- and simply add [members only] or [pay site] or similar.

Two ways to link to the story, but both have their limitations, problems that I really encountered when researching business articles recently for my upcoming IBM trade business book (whose name might well be changing, so I won't list it her). Bloggers like to talk about permalinks, permanent page addresses that will always point to the article referenced, but I'd like to ask a different question: how do we link to ephemeral items or information behind a wall of one sort or another?