Usurp Wikipedia And Build Authority. Cool.

If you're in the market to find ways to usurp an encyclopedic interloper and wanted to reestablish a long time brand while helping websites develop topical authority in the process, how would you do it?

Seems Encyclopædia Britannica found one. They've created an information widget webmasters can use to place authoritative information on their sites from EC's databases even the paid sections. Here's what it looks like and the marketing spiel that was launched with it:

Britannica Widgets are here, and with them you can instantly post an entire cluster of related Encyclopaedia Britannica articles on your blog or Web site. Just follow the instructions and copy and paste the several lines of code associated with each widget as html into the appropriate place on your site. Any readers who click on a link will get the entire Britannica article on the subject, even if access to the article normally requires a subscription. Really. Try it.

So let’s say you have a site about philosophy, or astronomy, or basketball. Stick one of the widgets below on your site and your readers will instantly have access to Britannica’s coverage of the subject.

Hopefully Britannica won't get a widget smack for using these, will be interesting to watch and see what happens. I'm rooting for them.