While cutting and pasting a piece of copy from a Politico story into a political message board post this morning, I noticed an interesting detail: Appended to the text was a “Read more” link to the story I was excerpting.

In other words, instead of pasting just the text one cuts, for example:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of “trying to pretend we are not at war” with terrorists

The pasting process appends additional text, like so:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of “trying to pretend we are not at war” with terrorists

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/31054.html#ixzz0bBKs68ai

Pretty slick. It’s a piece of JavaScript that allows Politico to measure a level of reader engagement about which they otherwise would have no idea. It also reinforces for the paster the notion of providing citations to original sources, always a good thing.

Want to know more about it? Check out this post from back in July over at The Nieman Journalism Lab.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 10:35 am and is filed under Internet Stuff.