The new My WSJ beta can mix your own feeds in with the WSJ's.
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Right-clicking on a word searches insides the WSJ archives.
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From the Micro Persuasion blog, I learned today of the Wall Street Journal's new online tools. (Note that the online WSJ is a paid service.) Unlike the New York Times, which has launched its own newsreader application, the WSJ is tweaking its online offering by adding cool tools such as a right-mouse-click function that lets you quickly search the WSJ archives on any word you read in a story, without losing your place on the page--very useful for doing research.

Also, there's a beta My WSJ front page that's really just a precustomized RSS reader site. Like Original Signal, which publishes preconfigured "metagator" sites, and like NetVibes, which lets you customize the feeds on your personal home page, the new My WSJ displays RSS feeds from different sections of the paper (U.S. News, Market News, and so on). You can even add your own favorite RSS feeds to the page. Hovering over a story displays the first part of the text.

Unlike the Times' application, the WSJ's experiments don't make the news prettier, but the custom My WSJ front page is smart, since it lets information junkies get just the news they want without having to go to another company's aggregation site. Traditionalists can stick with the main WSJ.com site.

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