Rick Bruner, a trusted business colleague, emailed me a pointer to an article on blog search engines published by the Wall Street Journal, with a caveat that the link would only work for seven days before the article was pushed into the paid member archive. I’m a paid subscriber, so I don’t much worry about that, but he also told me something I hadn’t realized that won’t mean anything to you unless you too are a subscriber: the “email this story” URL is actually a publicly accessible link.

When I cite the Wall Street Journal, I include the link to the story itself — not using the “email this story” URL — and simply add [members only] or [pay site] or similar.

Two ways to link to the story, but both have their limitations, problems that I really encountered when researching business articles recently for my upcoming IBM trade business book (whose name might well be changing, so I won’t list it her). Bloggers like to talk about permalinks, permanent page addresses that will always point to the article referenced, but I’d like to ask a different question: how do we link to ephemeral items or information behind a wall of one sort or another?

here’s something dissatisfying about linking to a temporary URL with a note like [note: this link will only work until 17 September, 2006] somehow. It seems to violate the whole spirit of the Web, somehow, particularly as a business communications vehicle.

Consider the reference section for my upcoming book: one of the unstated assumptions of any citation is that unless it’s a “personal interview”, someone else can always dig up the article, story, book or blog entry cited and see if they agree with the conclusions and derived facts and quotes in the new material. In academia especially, information is expected to be permanent.

But what happens if I have some outrageous claim about…