The Britannica WebShare program started about ten months ago, in mid-April 2008, and since it’s our practice to notify recipients of complimentary subscriptions two months before their subscriptions are about to expire, those of you who got one-year subscriptions to Britannica Online at the beginning of the program are starting to receive those notifications now.

If you still qualify as a Web publisher as you did last year, you can renew your subscription and get another year free. We do ask that you apply again and certify that you’re still a Web publisher. To do that and apply for your subscription, please go to the registration page.

Important: Please wait until your current subscription expires before applying for a renewal. I realize this may cause some interruption of your service, but we will try to expedite the renewals and send through approvals quickly. Thanks.

Please remember also that you can share any Britannica article with your readers simply by linking to it from your site as you would any other Web page. Readers who click on the link will get the article in its entirety even if they’re not Britannica subscribers. More here.

If you’re looking for background and history to make sense of the fighting between Russia and Georgia, these articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and associated widgets should help. You can link to any of them from your blog or Web site and your readers will get the article in its entirety. If you’re a blogger or Web publisher, of course, you’re entitled to a free subscription to Britannica Online, which will enable you to trawl the encyclopedia and the entire site for other relevant material.

• Georgia
• Russia
• Caucasus
• South Ossetia
• Abkhazia
• North Ossetia–Alania
• Vladimir Putin
• Dmitry Medvedev
• Georgia (year in review, from Britannica Book of the Year 2008)
• Georgia  (year in review, from Britannica Book of the Year 2007)

 
(Revised 8/12/08)
 

I closed my last post by introducing you to the Encyclopaedia Britannica Twitter stream. Some of you may be new to Twitter, or not even heard of it yet, so I thought I’d let you know what it is and why we’re using it to send out links and information.

Our Twitter account is: EBWebShare.

Twitter is a relatively news service that has taken many enthusiastic users of social media by storm. With Twitter, you can send a receive short messages — up to 140 characters. You receive the messages (known as “tweets”) from the people you have chosen to follow. People who opt to follow you will receive the tweets that you send out. You can send and receive over the web or over your mobile phone. The practice — which is at the heart of some other services, like Jaiku and Pownce – has come to be known as “microblogging.”

Because there are so many people “tweeting” to each other these days — often with links to interesting material — we thought it would be both fun and useful to share links and information with anyone who chose to EBWebShare. The daily link will introduce you to a topic that may have been unknown to you. Think of it as a little brain boost.

As always, we’re interested in your thoughts about our use of Twitter — is there something else we can do with our Twitter account that would be helpful? — and about WebShare in general.

All of us at Encyclopaedia Britannica are very pleased to introduce WebShare, a new initiative that lets web publishers and bloggers link to Britannica articles. Your readers will be able to follow those links without an account.

This site is dedicated to the WebShare initiative and includes a variety of tools and guides to help you make the most out of WebShare. To start with, read through the FAQs (they’re short). This will tell you exactly how the program works and what you have to do to get started. Then complete the registration form for your free account. It’s not an instant process, I’m afraid, but you’ll get your userid and password in a day or two.

We also have a lot of resources for you here on this site. There’s this blog, for instance, where we’ll keep you up to date on the program, how people are using it, tools, and resources. We’ll be producing screencasts to show you how to use the various tools; we already have one on the Assets page to show you how to insert a link to a Britannica article into a web page or blog post, just in case you’re new to web publishing.

We’re particularly excited about two features of this site. “Topic Clusters” are collections of links to material from throughout Brittanica.com related to news and current events. We’ll add these regularly. And we have a Twitter feed. If you are a Twitter user, you can choose to follow Britannica — our id is EBWebShare. We’ll send out a tweet a day with a link to something we think you’ll enjoy. We’ll also tweet to inform you of new blog posts here at Britannicanet.com.