David Weinberger has the scoop that the NY Times.com will begin to open up their archives by publishing “topic pages” of NYTimes content. The issue at hand is that currently, older articles are go into the for-pay archive after 10 days and all the old links to the NYTimes die. Therefore, if you search for a news topic, NYTimes archive stories are almost never in the top results.
Between the purchase of About and this new strategy, it should be interesting to see what the other for-pay archive news content businesses will do (i.e. the Wall Street Journal.)
Joho the Blog: The news from NYTimes.com
Gen, sorry to have been confusing. The Times has given no indication they are going to open their archives. On their topics pages, for archived articles, they are thinking about displaying the summary written by the people who put together The Times Index. They want to see “what people find most useful,” although opening up the archives didn’t seem to be one of the possibilities.