Chief Blogging Officer
If you’ve been to one of our ContentBiz Subscription Summits, you’ve no doubt heard Patrick Spain speak about how his firm HighBeam Research makes for better researching on the web. Now HighBeam has put together an unusual, yet fascinating new promotion.
They’ve partnered with Christopher Locke, co-author of the best selling Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual and Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, to write a blog about how to use HighBeam in, well, blogs.
Confusing? It was to us as well at first…it’s not clear whether the demo site, which has the tongue-in-cheek URL of ChiefBloggingOfficer.com, is supposed to be a good blog read or a not-so-subtle advertisement.
The site has Locke blogging on various subjects with links to HighBeam-researched articles. Good news is the linked articles are free. The idea is to convince bloggers who often need to research deep into the archives for their blogs to use HighBeam to locate that background material.
Locke has assembled a blogging A-list of buddies linked on the left side column, including Cory Doctorw, Esther Dyson, Doc Searls, and Chris Pirillo among others, who he says will also post links to HighBeam content.
The model makes sense in a certain way, though it’s bound to rub some bloggers the wrong way. In the ongoing quest to figure out a sustainable blogging revenue stream, HighBeam is essentially saying: let us help your blogs dig deeper.
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