That’s because there’s no need after all (for us, Google, or Wikipedia) to feel defensive—any thunder Cauz could bring down is still a long way out.

Remember Scrappy Doo? Don’t know why I bring him up. Just thought of him for some reason.

To jog your memory, along with the baby-steps into Web 2.0 announcement, Cauz harshly criticized Google for giving Wikipedia such high authority in the search results. "Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?" he asked.

Cauz and his britannican company have long looked down their nose at the crowd-sourced wisdom of Wikipedia. And that, as always, has been a fair criticism. But while this week’s scrappy comments served to get his website a lot of attention, that may be all they get if Britannica stays locked behind a paid subscription wall.

So, smart on the publicity front, even if, once the opposition squints and gets a good look—way down there—they just faintly feel the waft of hot air rising.

Here’s why: According to Hitwise, Wikipedia gets almost 97 percent of encyclopedia traffic on the Web. MSN’s Encarta, Encyclopedia.com, and Fact Monster combined grab very nearly the three percent remaining, and Britannica is in fifth place with 0.57 percent of encyclopedia traffic. The average session at Wikipedia is ten minutes, compared to under three minutes at Britannica.

And while he’s busy complaining about the all the authoritative love Google gives Wikipedia, Cauz is ignoring that Britannica gets darn near half of its traffic via Google search. That’s likely due to generous relevancy placing on Google’s part because Britannica has been around for a couple of centuries.

But what Britannica lacks, and will continue lack with a subscription wall, are links, which Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins so deftly notes:

”In order to compete with Wikipedia in the Google SERP, Britannica needs to build up inbound links. If content is locked up behind the paid content walls, people will be much more likely to link to other websites with free content (such as that available on Wikipedia).”

So what it boils down to is we have Cauz blaming Google for Cauz’s own misunderstanding of how the web publishing world and Google works. Granted, Jimmy Wales has to beg for money periodically to stay afloat. But this is just one Wikipedia weakness that could be exploited if Cauz had more brains than lip.

In addition to the automatic advantage of name recognition, Britannica can add credibility and standards to the online encyclopedia game where Wikipedia refuses, and, drawing enough of a crowd, can make money via advertising and other revenue models where Wikipedia also refuses.

Wikipedia’s not perfect, neither is Google. But Britannica’s got a lot of basic SEO work and catching up to do before jealous presidential lampoons come close to hitting the mark.    
 

One reason is simply that linking to an explanation of something provides a reader of your content with an opportunity to find out more, or see something in more depth, without you the blogger having to explain it all in your blog post.

And like just about everyone I know, I tend to link to material on Wikipedia more than any other online information resource.

Why? Because it’s easy to do so, it’s free, Wikipedia’s definitions are often all you might need, and because you can have reasonable confidence that what you’re linking to is likely to be accurate enough.

So I’ve been quite intrigued to have been exploring Encyclopaedia Britannica online during the past few weeks and getting to know how a raft of new and free social media-related services, aimed squarely at bloggers and other people who publish on the web, will work.

(Disclosure: I’ve been working with Shel Holtz, whose client US-based Britannica is, on getting advance word out to some people in Europe about the upcoming launch of Britannica’s new services; as part of this, Britannica gave me a free account.)

Unlike Wikipedia, Britannica’s information resources require a paid subscription, one reason undoubtedly why free Wikipedia is an easier option for many.

Now, you can link to the full content of a Britannica entry, without having to have a paid subscription, through a new programme called Britannica Webshare.

Take this topic example – global warming. You want to find detailed information to reference in a blog post. If you participate in Webshare, you can link to global warming on Britannica, just as you can link to global warming on Wikipedia.

Go ahead, try it, see what you think. I’m not saying one is better than the other. Both provide breadth and depth of information with links to further details on a very big topic.

Personally, I like Britannica’s conversational and lay content style in this example, plus embedded video and other content on the same page to give you a rich multimedia experience.

And maybe the word ‘authoritative’ comes into play here: do people think works on Encylopaedia Britannica carry more authority than content elsewhere as those works are researched and written by academics? Are they more trusted therefore? Big questions.

But freely linking to full content on the Britannica website is just one element of what Britannica is now offering.

The Webshare programme offers topic clusters and widgets to bloggers and other web publishers which you can embed on your own site. Like this widget from which you can explore deeper into a topic and see all content related to that topic:

There’s also a Twitter channel you can follow to get daily tips about online content and updates about the Webshare programme.

I’m sure bloggers will have lots of opinion on the merits of Britannica’s moves with social media. That’s very welcome!

Some influential opinion-makers have already posted some initial commentary. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post on Friday includes this view:

[…] Britannica is doing a lot of things right – a relatively small staff of a hundred or so editors manages 4,000 unpaid (I believe) contributors who are recognized experts in their field. But, like the music labels, they still somehow feel as though people should pay to consume their content. And that means search engines can’t index their content. And that means they don’t exist.

Take a look at the more than 70 comments to his post – some terrific discussion there.

Dennis Howlett’s post yesterday has this opinion:

[…] People pay for scarcity and while you can argue that Wikipedia trumps Britannica because of the cost element, I know which I prefer to use as a primary research tool. Britannica will develop an alternative business model that allows it to attract revenue but quite how that shapes up remains to be seen. If it chooses to drop its annual charge for full access, then it could develop deeper resources paid for on an ‘as required’ basis.

All excellent discussion material.

The Britannica Webshare programme is now rolling out. If you’d like to know a bit about the outreach planning behind the upcoming launch, take a look at Shel’s post today.

And if you’d like to be part of Webshare, you can apply online.

(I have a few discretionary free Britannica.com accounts available so if you’re a journalist or a business or academic blogger in Europe and would like one, drop me a concise note outlining why.)

Comments

And no, I’m not being a smartass and suggesting that you cut Google out of the picture (after all, Britannica and Merriam-Webster have their own sites).  Instead, Tony Ruscoe writes, “I’ve found a way you can enable the dictionary and thesaurus features now – even before they’re released!”

Should you follow Ruscoe’s instructions, don’t expect everything to work perfectly.  “It’s obvious why this hasn’t been released yet,” according to the Google Blogoscoped guru, who cites a number of bugs and strange problems.

Aside from programming issues, there’s also the matter of Google’s taste in partners.  After all, Britannica isn’t exactly a go-to resource for a lot of people, and Ionut Alex Chitu, who seems to have first found the hidden features, notes, “It’s rather curious that Google didn’t opt for everyone’s favorite encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and choose the oldest English-language encyclopedia still in print, but also an encyclopedia hard to access online for free.”

Yet Google Docs could bring in Wikipedia at some point in the future, even as the search engine giant will presumably address the minor problems Ruscoe discovered.

I’m looking today, my first day back from vacation, at the Brittanica Blog and its Web 2.0 Forum. There are a few names there, like Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky, whose work I always like.

Shirky’s book, The Internet by Email, proved very useful back in the day when I had email at work just as the Net was taking off, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and the Mosaic crowd. Don’t get me started about dialup modems.

It was very much Web 1.0, even though no one called it that. Web 2.0 is more an invention by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle for their conference series. It means something as a term. The meaning just happens to be somewhat nebulous.

A Britannica series of well-spoken bloggers discussing Web 2.0 should be educational. I’m catching up on a week of their posts. I’ve learned about Goya and George Dyson and Wordsworth, but not much about Web 2.0.

The common theme of the discussion holds that it may or may not be a good thing that anyone with access to the Internet can post pretty much anything they like. “Old revolutions good, new revolutions bad,” Shirky called it in summary.

Wisdom of the crowds is an oxymoron, to be invested with little trust. People should learn to think more critically. Reasonable statements, but I’m no closer to understanding why this is a Web 2.0 discussion than when I started.

As the series of discussions continue on the Britannica Blog, I’m going to request that the highly educated minds participating on it do something they haven’t accomplished yet. Build a foundation for Web 2.0, for discussing it, and create on top of that.

“We get the God we deserve,” Carr said of the spread of computer technology as a harbinger of change. I’d like to understand what Web 2.0 is first before getting anything I might deserve.

We were reminded of this by an entry on Gary Price’s Resource Shelf about a blog we hadn’t seen previously.

The Britannica Blog (Motto: “Where Ideas Matter”) features posts on a broad selection of topics. Authors for these posts tend to be people who have researched and written material for the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.

Recent posts consider the religious beliefs of America’s Founding Fathers, the sighting of a coyote in New York’s Central Park, and the always-touchy topic of tort reform. It’s a nice distraction from PPC and click fraud discussions.

The other site has been a fixture in our bookmarks for so long it would have barnacles attached if it were a boat. Arts & Letters Daily (Motto: “Veritas Odit Moras,” or roughly ‘truth hates delay’) may look unfriendly with listings for articles based on de Tocqueville or T.S. Eliot, but thinking so would be judging too soon.

They manage to find a lot of off-the-beaten-path intelligent content that gleefully romps from subject to subject. Summarizing what they cover at Arts & Letters would be like giving bicycle lessons to a goldfish.

Both sites manage to offer the visitor something to think about when it’s time to give Yahoo Panama a break. Really.

—

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Skeptics have declared victory in their campaigns to discredit the resource, scoffing at the notion that anybody who drops by could possibly pen an article as accurate as those you would find in a real encyclopedia. While I have always sought to confirm information obtained in Wikipedia with a second independent source (a holdover from my long-ago days as a newspaper reporter, I suppose), I’ve been impressed with the site’s overall accuracy and have remained convinced that it is a fairly reliable tool.

Today, my opinion is vindicated (and Jimmy Wales is probably spewing hundreds of “I told you so’s”) thanks to the highly-regarded journal Nature”>Nature, which released a study noting that Wikipedia is about as accurate as Brittanica. According to a CNN story, “The finding, based on a side-by-side comparison of articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum, comes as Wikipedia faces criticism over the accuracy of some of its entries…Of eight “serious errors” the reviewers found-including misinterpretations of important concepts-four came from each source, the journal reported.”

Wales is gratified by the results, according to the article. Britannica, not suirprisingly, has no comment. In the Nature article, several Britannica staffers argue that Wikipedia entries are often poorly written and structured, but

Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that Wikipedia’s strongest suit is the speed at which it can updated, a factor not considered by Nature’s reviewers. “People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica,” Twidale adds. “Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one.”

I can’t wait to hear the anti-Wikipedia backlash, especially from those looking to file a class action lawsuit.

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.