Social Media Hot Tub

That’s the problem with the freedom of the press – it has a way of staying free. It’s the quandary from which newspapers simply can’t extricate themselves. The truth is, they can’t help themselves. Like the scorpion and the frog, it’s their nature.

But, OK, good for us, then.

Back in April the Wall Street Journal ran a piece extolling the virtues of a new digital bookmarking tool that makes sharing a much more robust experience. iCyte allows a user to share a Web site as it looks to that particular user at that particular point in time. This is big news to anyone who’s been frustrated by the experience of bookmarking a site only to return to it through the bookmark tool and find it’s since been taken down. With an iCyte bookmark, the present view of the site will be available ad infinitum.

Your free iCyte account allows you to designate your saved pages, or Cytes, as public or private; to file them into different project sets of your own imagining; and to share access to them by email or with embedding tools.

At the time I read the piece – which, seemingly aware of the irony, WSJ exempts from subscriber-only access – I was doing research for a client using his login information. He had several executive team members with whom he wanted to share access to the articles I collected, whether they were subscribers or not.

Sometimes, the information you need just has a way of appearing exactly when you need it. Using this iCyte tool, much lauded by the Journal, I was able to freely share premium content with nonsubscribers.

Since then, I’ve used it for all my bookmarking, saving science articles for my nine-year-old son, recipes for neighbors, and anything else where I want to be able to save the content – as I see it NOW – for any time in the future.

The truth is, aside from my Web hosting, there’s nothing I pay for online. So I don’t make it a habit of sharing paid content with nonsubscribers as an act of principled subterfuge.

But it’s awfully nice to know I can.

Here’s a handy dandy video from the author of that WSJ explaining in a bit more detail about iCyte. Share at will!