HighBeam Research has partnered with blogger Christopher Locke to help the company develop a new resource for bloggers and aspiring bloggers.
Locke — co-author of the best selling Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual and Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, who was also named by the Financial Times as one of the world’s Top 50 Management Thinkers — is helping HighBeam Research develop tools that make it easy for bloggers to enhance their blogs with information found on the HighBeam Research Engine.
Patrick Spain, chairman and CEO of HighBeam Research, said, “We think of Chris as a ‘Chief Blogging Officer’ and if we can create the kind of blogging tools that he finds useful, then we are on the right track for creating a great resource for all bloggers. And if we don’t, we are sure to find ourselves written up in one of his blogs!”
As a way to pilot the new HighBeam Research blogging tools, Locke — known for his irreverent views and tongue-in-cheek observations — is blogging daily on a demonstration site he has amusingly named, “Chief Blogging Officer.”
Locke’s blog showcases how bloggers can use the HighBeam Research Engine to search more than 3,000 newspapers, magazines, journals and transcripts on HighBeam Library; meta-search the entire Web on HighBeam Web; fact-check using encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses and almanacs on HighBeam Reference; and use HighBeam Executives to research more than 20 million profiles of business people.
Locke said, “The HighBeam database of 33 million articles going back almost 25 years is the best resource I’ve found for adding historical depth of focus to the sort of stuff I write about. Any blogger who wants to get at the trends and issues underlying today’s headlines will immediately see the same benefit I did. And their readers will too. I’m turned on at the prospect of making the HighBeam Research content and tools more accessible to the blogging world.”
In addition to advanced searching options, e-mail alerts and folders for organizing articles, HighBeam Research now offers a tool that allows bloggers to easily link to the full text of a relevant article from their blog.
While full text articles are usually only available to HighBeam Research Full Members who pay a subscription, as part the HighBeam Research Bloggers Program, bloggers will be able to provide their readers with time-limited free access to full text articles in their blogs.
Spain added, “Given Chris’ sense of humor and ability to juxtapose the highly credible information he acquires daily on HighBeam Research with his irreverent and opinionated world view, we expect this to be a lively and entertaining blog. It will also serve as a great example for all bloggers and potential bloggers on how to write well-researched, useful and … well … fun blogs.”
Locke has recruited a crack team of well-known bloggers who will also use the HighBeam Research tools to enhance their own sites. Interested bloggers can contact cbo@highbeam.com to be part of the program.
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