Leave it to Patrick Spain of HighBeam to come up with a great term, and create a clever and proactive use of a blogging partnership to provide additional "bleach" = blog reach for Highbeam.
He's partnered with Christopher Locke (of Cluetrain Manifesto fame); Locke runs a blog called Chief Blogging Officer. It highlights some of the content available in HighBeam, and a new feature: a tool that allows bloggers to easily link to the full text of a relevant HighBeam article from a blog, and limited-time free access to the article.
This shows three strong assumptions on Patrick's part:
1. Blogs are a powerful lead generation tool
2. Not all Blogs are created equal; hitching up with a very popular, high viral quotient Blog figure is more powerful than him starting up "Patrick's Blog" to try to do the same thing.
3. Showing integration of Highbeam content inside a top Bloggers daily task routine of blogging is fabulous: It says historical perspective is valuable, cool bloggers use "old fashioned" traditional research tools, and blogs are better when they have more specific content to illuminate opinions and chat talk.
Where other vendors of premium content see a threat or a rival, HighBeam using blogs to showcase its premium content and drive traffic.
