14 DAY TRIAL // BigThink.com is a new video site that's meant to bring to the online audience various hot topics talked about big thinkers of today, from the worlds of politics, academia, science and business. It's currently in Beta but it looks somewhere between decent and nice and it counts Peter Thiel and Larry Summers, a former Harvard president, as investors.
The site currently hosts 2,000 clips from 85 "guests", among who we might find Senator John McCain, psychologist Steven Pinker, economist Paul Krugman, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg. They answer a single question in each video against a white background and their answers last between three and five minutes. Short and concise are the main words, apparently, although highly informative. The video quality is good, but some of the videos present the thinkers in a pinkish tone because of poor lighting. Nevertheless, it's the message that counts.
The video database is continually growing, up to the point where there will probably be a daily interview schedule, while at the moment there are about 100 hours of video already captured that await editing.
On to the website itself, it's bright and the colors are nicely chosen, with bluish tones that encourage thought and meditation, but I know that was not the point of it. It's not clustered, but it has some serious navigational problems. If you're a personality's fan and you want to see all the videos your idol has contributed with, you won't be able to do that just yet. Nor will you be able to drag the video slider, in case you want to skip to a certain point in the video, you'll have to go through it all again.
It kind of reminds me a bit of Ted.com, a fervent fan of which I used to be when it launched. I guess what BigThink has more is the adding of videos every day and even that's not there just yet. I think we'll just have to wait and see where this leads to. I think that this could easily have been a channel on YouTube, but don't tell anyone.