Big newspaper websites are not taking advantage of one of their biggest assets.

When someone clicks on an article, that’s a huge decision point, almost on the level of entering in a search keyword. By clicking on a headline, that means that at that moment a visitor is entirely interested in that article. On a big website like the NYT, there are hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of people making these decisions at the same time, many times each day.

Apart from popularity lists, newspapers currently do very little to take advantage of this. Some sites, notably CNN, have begun to collect these clicks and, it seems, sort they by session, letting them give rudimentary recommendations.

However, this is only a fraction of what is possible. Given a giant set of session information, it is theoretically possible to, within 4 or 5 clicks (the NYT has said that many visitors spend upwards of half an hour on the site), group the reader with a specific community of other readers who have the same concerns, which is computable by any number of ml algorithms.

Currently, the NYT has an annoying top bar that invites me to join Times People. Wtf?! The benefit of joining is entirely unclear. Instead, imagine if it said something to the effect of “You are not alone! There are 1,387 people who appear to share you interests, see what other stuff they’re interested in! For example, x y and z.”

The sell for times people is currently: “Make the most of TimesPeople: Add more people to your network and start recommending!” Wtf? I’ve been reading nyt articles with this login for years. Why on earth can the NYT not give me recommendations and group me with a community immediately? The benefits are totally unclear, which is why they are probably having very limited adoption.

Something like this has gigantic potential. One of fundamental wins of twitter is that there are, essentially, communities of people who don’t know each other grouping up around specific topics with very little effort involved for immediate, clear benefits. For example, with Rails, the people following Jamis, Obie, D2h, etc have formed a spontaneous community. A similar thing is going on with posts on the web, in that gigantic communities form within minutes around specific areas of interest. Whoever takes advantage of this will see massive increases in pageviews.

Digg, delicious, and the other aggregators all realize this. Why can’t newspapers? When newspapers do, they will engage an entirely new market that is currently unavailable to digg and delicious. But, they need to move fast, as the 40+ crowd is rapidly moving to facebook. Thus, time is not on the newspaper’s side, as this advantage will fade in the next 4 years as the adult market moves to younger venues.