Britanica Online Fight Back

Kung FU Fighting with Wikipedia

The publisher's Britannica WebShare initiative, launched April 13 with Twitter streaming of a daily topic, announced on Friday a service called Britannica Widgets, with which bloggers can "post an entire cluster of related Encyclopaedia Britannica articles" for free.

Britannica also is offering "people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, Webmasters, or writers," free access to Britannica's online content, with registration.

To use the widgets, anyone can now "copy and paste the several lines of code associated with each widget as HTML into the appropriate place on your site," Tom of Britannica WebShare wrote in a post. "Any readers who click on a link will get the entire Britannica article on the subject, even if access to the article normally requires a subscription. Really. Try it."

I somehow feel this is going to be an uphill battle. The article implies for example that since I keep a regular blog that I could get free online access. Well, I might be induced to look into it if I could be guaranteed no spam mail or that I will have unlimited access. To me that is the rub of it. I am spoiled by the Internet. I enjoy the instant gratification of for nothing school of researching.
The frustration of working remotely from home and being denied access because there are problems with the server, you have no proxy, your subscription has expired, and a host of other little annoyances are part of the virtual world.

For example, I am currently working on a book. Most of my researching is being done in libraries and at home with my personal reference collection-that is BOOKS! I know, you have heard campfire tales of your grandparents owning and using these heavy box shaped paper weights. Yet sometimes it isn't available for free on the web. I often find that I need works of a peer reviewed quality, and the Internet is a haven for all sorts of rubbish. It is also full of potential good, too. The problem is that good information is often swimming in an ocean of worthless information. Most good researching on line must happen through libraries and university servers. Scholars publish on line sometimes, and there is a new generation of teachers and university professors using social software and wiki's to publish. The emergence of open source software has led to some hope of free access to the best literature in sciences, social sciences, and arts. The problem is that greed often precedes these endeavors. In most cases it is not a universal access where for example, the X university is posting actual complete video taped or pod casted lectures of professor Y with notes. You couldn't really sit at home and watch an entire semester of lectures on You Tube for example.

The concept of open access on the Internet as theorized by the early architects of the Internet is different than what we see in most cases. The exceptions are sites like Wikipedia. Even the long awaited and talked about Google initiative to scan ever book in existence and post on line is not what it seems. Often I will find that I get only portions of the book and links to .com selling sites like Amazon or Borders Books.

Then I think that I some how got it wrong. That I never understood the point of free access on line and that my deluded notion of some Utopian free for all was me building sandcastles.

So yes, I will walk into the Britannica Online with my tail between my legs and humbly sign up and hope for the best. I am seeking knowledge after all, not ask Yahoo or Billy Bub.com online.

Any thoughts?


http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9923867-7.html?tag=nefd.top