Ryan MacMillan

I’m at university. Ergo half of everything I have ever written ever has been copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Students don’t read any more, we surf, we google, we wiki-search we use Jstor we will do ANYTHING to avoid picking up a book. This has meant that such institutions as Encyclopedia Britannica have been taking a kicking in recent time. Well, not any more…

As of last Wednesday Britannica Webshare released ‘Britannica Widgets’. Lord knows the Web 2.0 savvy love nothing more than a good widget and boy have Britannica Webshare provided us with some cool widgets. The widgets are in essence blurbs of topics to be found on their online - paid for - encyclopedia. However click on the widget and it links you through to the relevant encyclopedia entry FREE OF CHARGE. But thats not all, oh no, the widget isn’t just a static link to a bigger article: it generates a cluster around a topic. So for example you have a widget about ‘Plato’ but it generates a cluster around it encompassing the entire topic of ‘Philosophy’ enabling you to access a myriad of other philosophical topics from the one initial Plato widget. More on this after the jump…

If you go here you can see all the topic clusters and they promise they are adding more everyday. Its easy and free to copy the code for the widgets (see below) so you can post the info widget in to a relevant blog post or website as well as providing the blog post/website with the cluster of information around the topic. This enables any and all readers to link through to the full article. An article I must stress that hasn’t been written by Joe Public but an expert.

Oh and if that isn’t all Encyclopedia Britannica are allowing prolific Web publishers, bloggers, webmasters, or writers free access to their entire online resources. To apply one fills in an online form and Britannica then decide whether you are influential enough to warrant free access. Seems like a great way to utilise the most prolific and imortant online avenues to re-assert the Encyclopedia Britannica brand as a digital force to be reckoned with.

It will be interesting to see how successful all of these ploys are in wrestling the crown back off Wikipedia as the number one digital encyclopedia but it certainly looks as if Encyclopedia Britannica are going about it in the right way. Certainly in terms of KUDOS these widgets are vastly Knowledgeable since they provide us with a cluster of Useful information; they’re Desirable in so far as they look pretty cool and provide you free access to a massively respected online resource; they’re not really that Open since they’re all made by Britannica but they are eminently Shareable as they allow you to ‘grab’ the html code to post anywhere on the net.

Hurrah for Encyclopedia Britannica!