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Britannica beckons to bloggers

This from Wired's Epicenter:

Old-school encyclopedia Britannica is giving bloggers free subscriptions to Britannica Online, the internet version of its multivolume masterpiece.

What this means is that bloggers no longer have to rely on Wikipedia's crowdsourced and sometimes questionably factual encyclopedia entries when they want to insert a quick link to background info on, say, Bosnia, or circular polarized light, or the grammatical structure of Klingon.

Here's the scoop. Britannica Webshare is a program started by Encyclopaedia Britannica that allows online publishers?bloggers included?to use premium information in Britannica Online for their own research or to share with their readers by providing them with access to individual articles. The program is free, but eligibilty is limited. In short, you sign up, provide them with the requisite information about your site, and they review your submission and decide whether or not you qualify. For more details see Britannica's FAQs. BoardBuzz sees this as an attempt to remain competitive with the free Wikipedia. TechCrunch states that according to Comscore, for every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million page views per month). If this pilot project isn't successful, Brittanica might have to open up their content to the public. As TechCrunch also states, their differentiating factor from Wikipedia will be that they have experts guiding articles, so they?ll have a claim to be more authoritative. Until that day, BoardBuzz thinks this Webshare is interesting and has potential. And yes, we've just signed up!

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on May 05, 2008 (boomark / email).