Britannica on the Underground

Over the last couple of weeks the Encyclopaedia Britannica has been covering the recent commissioning of 100 works to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the London Underground's Roundel. Two prints were made of each of the works: one added to the underground's archive of art and one auctioned on ebay. Unfortunately the Briannica's quality must be called into question once again; they failed to highlight Karl Holmqvist's "Let's Go Together"...that's the one we bought.

Before I had web access, it was highly unlikely that I would have heard of the commissioning, and if I had heard of it, it would have seemed too far away to do anything about it. Sometimes we forget how much the web has changed our lives in such a short period of time.

Britannica 1.5

An article over at TechCrunch points to some of the changes that are going on over at Britannica, most noticeably their new Webshare program:

A special program for web publishers, including bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who writes for the Internet. You get complimentary access to the Encyclopedia Britannica online and, if you like, an easy way to give your readers background of the topics you write about with links to complete Britannica articles.

It would seem to be a move where everybody wins, Britannica's content is promoted for free, whilst bloggers and other publishers get access to a high quality encyclopedia. Unfortunately they "reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify", so I will have to wait and see if they deem my blog worthy.