When you think of the average Wall Street Journal reader, what image pops into your mind? If you're like me, it's a snapshot of a roughly middle-aged man or woman, someone with a fairly important job and a relatively high income. Okay -- now think about the average user of Facebook. Probably young, maybe in college, or maybe someone older who is fairly tech-savvy. Someone who wants to share photos with friends, perhaps, or keep track of what their colleagues are up to -- or maybe play an online game now and then, like the one where you're a zombie and you have to infect as many of your friends as you can.

Not a whole lot of overlap between those two groups, at least on first glance. And yet, the Wall Street Journal just announced a partnership with a company called Loomia, which will allow Facebook users to add a "widget" to their online profiles at the social-networking site, which will show the WSJ articles that their friends have read or recommended. Loomia powers a similar feature on the Wall Street Journal site, which shows you other articles that are similar to the one you're looking at.

In some ways, the Wall Street Journal's move seems a little desperate -- like your mom or dad trying to break-dance at one of your parties, to show how "hip" and "with it" they are. Is there really going to be enough crossover between the WSJ and Facebook to make such a widget worthwhile? At the same time, however, Facebook's appeal has been expanding over the past year or so to include a lot more older (and presumably more Journal-inclined) users. If a widget brings new readers to the site, the paper must be thinking, then so much the better. And a Facebook widget isn't exactly expensive.

Now if only you could track your score in the Zombie application from your Wall Street Journal subscriber page.