I’m not sure if this is brilliance, or desperation, but I do know that I, and lots of other bloggers, get a free 1 year membership to Britannica online – which can’t be a bad thing for us. So how?
Surprisingly registering myself on the website for access was very straightforward. You simply provide the address of your website, your name & email address and away you go. And literally within the space of 10 hours or so I received an email with my promotional code – which makes me think the process is semi-automated – unless they have a huge team of people verifying websites. Once you have the email, click the link, register properly and you will be given access to Encyclopaedia Britannica for free (for a year.) So how useful is it?
Well my initial look is very positive. You can link to articles from your website and anyone will be able to read them without a subscription – which, otherwise, would pretty much make the idea useless. So, if I wanted to reference an article about IBM it’s as easy as clicking the link.
It makes more sense, as a blogger, to get balanced sources of information – and to always question a single source until it’s verified elsewhere. The amount of verification depends on the person. The facility to use Britannica online is a good one, but I think generally bloggers will use it for verification and so won’t link to the article directly. If this was the case with most people, they obviously won’t draw people to the website which is the whole reason for this promotion in the first place.