A few weeks ago, when I was at the Touch and Go festival, I ran into a friend of AZ and mine who now works for Britannica. He intimated that the company was thinking more about social software, in no small part because of the mindshare challenges presented by Wikipedia [eb | wp] et al. to the commercial underpinnings of Britannica.
I thought a bit about the conversation over the course of the evening, but didn't get to put any thoughts down before the splendrous noise of Scratch Acid pushed the thoughts to the back of my mind.
Well, it looks like one of the first pieces of that evolution he discussed is coming to pass, in the form of Britannica Blog, a multi-author weblog from some of the producers at Britannica. It's early days yet, but with some good fortune and some more transparency, maybe they'll be able to show the institutional side of the knowledge-editorial story. There's more social outreach to be done by this grey lady of the libraries, but it looks like they're making a decent start.
What else could they do? Off the top of my head, some ideas I'd steal from the social software movement:
- More attribution and matrix-knowledge about authors
- Historical views of entries (new and revised is promoted, but how?)
- Transclusion (and, duh, purpling)
- user commentary and tagging
- reduced limitations on the non-member viewer (ok, this is social as much as removal of barrier). Why restrict the curious from the 'related' items, for example? Why the very short summaries for non-featured content?
Obviously, from the inside these are hard, difficult questions. There's multiple (and sometimes competing) fiduciary responsibilities at play - to the knowledge and accrued information that makes the Britannica product, to the historical strength of that editorial content, and to the corporate ownership of that information and rights thereto. A balance is, doubtlessly, an ongoing game.
{aside: I would have linked to EB across the external links in this, but couldn't due to lack of content, unless specifically noted the links are to Wikipedia, despite the experimental attempt}
Technorati Tags: collaboration, encyclopediaBritannica, purple, tags, wikipedia
Posted by esinclai at October 25, 2006 10:27 PM |