Dow Jones & Company last month launched new alert widgets in Dow Jones Factiva that will enable users to post and share business news and information on company portals, intranets, wikis and team sites. Wikis can be used to provide access to more consumer-based sites such as weather and entertainment, but Dow Jones boasts that how this offering is unique in that it facilitates the sharing of news from sources such as The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.

Dow Jones Factiva users (which includes users of Factiva.com, Factiva Search 2.0 and Factiva iWorks) can create up to 20 alerts with Factiva widgets, and display either headlines or headlines with snippets. When a widget is posted, Dow Jones Factiva users can click through to read full-text articles that are updated every 15 minutes. The widgets can also be posted to any personal page, such as iGoogle, Netvibes, Blogger and Pageflakes.

This is a very innovative idea that proves you can put high value tools on top of basic textual news stories, not just data. Overall, this makes the information more usable for Dow Jones customers since they can easily integrate it into their workflow. More and more users are demanding such functionality from their content-related tools these days. By providing them, Dow Jones will certainly promote an increased use of and reliance on its offerings.
Yet, most importantly, this new feature enables users to share content more easily. Such functionality will benefit Dow Jones as it will effectively draw more eyeballs to the company's news content.