David Weinberger, besides being the brilliant writer that gave us The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small pieces loosely joined, is a strategic marketing consultant, a very good one. And, as long as I’m aware of, he always spent his capabilities to advise innovative companies (Interleaf, Open Text, …), using new tools and creating new scenarios (see the Howard Dean campaign).

But few days ago, he wrote this endorsement post about HighBeam

Thanks to RageBoy’s Chief Blogging Officer gig, I’ve known about HighBeam, but it’s only as I buckle down to some serious writing that I’ve discovered just how great resource it is.

Since he’s definitely an A-lister, I jumped to check this “great resource”. What a disappointment! HighBeam is an old style aggregator, a database of magazines, journals, … In this categories there are hundreds of similar products. Most of them are bigger collection than HighBeam (Ebsco, Dialog, Factiva, Ingenta, Elsevier’s Scirus, …)

The new idea behind HighBeam is to seduce the blogging community giving them a “Blog this article” link. Click on it and HighBeam will generate the html with the citation info. Every blogger with a valid HighBeam subscription could link to papers and articles not freely available on the web. Cool? Definitely not!

Endorsing this marketing approach is not enough, so David Weinberger go on and promise:

I will be using HighBeam a whole heck of a lot.

Fantastic. I hope this won’t affect his way of blogging. The small pieces fo HighBeam are not even loosely joined to rest of the Internet. Isn’t this a menace to the conversation?

I’m not saying that since HighBeam is a commercial venture, the blogosphere should reject it. I would just prefer to see bloggers supporting the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Arxiv database, the Project Gutenberg collection, …

This projects can contribute to strengthen the connections between the blogosphere and the academia. Maybe we should all campaign to ask the bodies behind these open access initiatives to release tools specifically designed for bloggers. Today is not that easy to cite an article stored in the DOAJ database or an abstract from PubMed. Not to mention linking to a specific paragraph from a book in the Project Gutenberg collection.

Furthermore we cannot rely anymore on huge public institution efforts, like the one from the National Library of Medicine that gave us the PubMed repository. The failure of PubScience teach us that only project supported by large communities will survive, otherwise we will always see big corporations stopping everything with disruptive consequences for their markets. PubScience died because of Scirus.

I hope David Weinberger will lead this campaign to promote public access initiatives to his fellow bloggers!