britannica webshare and twitter

The Britannica has long been holding out against giving away content, but the walls are finally beginning to crumble with ' Webshare.' They're making an offer to anyone who publishes on the net on a regular basis that they can have free access to all content, and that they can link to it, allowing their readers to have access to entire articles.

I've added in their widget pointing to an article on the Internet - it'll be interesting to see what happens; in my preview window it's just saying that it's loading, so we'll have to see if it does load!

If you're a blogger, and you blog on a regular basis, you can sign up from the link above - so if anyone asks you why it's worth becoming a blogger, you now have a whole new reason to give them!

Seriously though, it's about time the EB did something like this - they're being hammered by Wikipedia in terms of numbers of visits and they're very much in danger of pricing themselves entirely out of the market. Moving in this direction is a good step forward, and I'm willing to be that it's not the only one they'll take.

They also have a Twitter account so that you can keep up to date with the goings on at http://twitter.com//EBWebShare but there's not a lot there, but they do have 97 keen enthusiastic followers!

Comments

[Jenny Luca]

We've just stopped our subscription to Ecyclopedia Brittanica in our school library for the reasons you mention in this post. Wikipedia has become so much better and they are pricing themselves out of the market. This is a very interesting development and like you, I think it won't be the last move we see brittanica and other subscription databases make to ensure that they don't become defunct in the marketplace.