Bigthink.com, "a youtube for ideas," debuts today

[swag]

http://www.bigthink.com

from NYT:

Big Think (www.bigthink.com) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics, to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system. It plans to add new features as it goes along, including a Facebook-like application for social networking, and Mr. Hopkins said he would like the site to become a popular place for college students looking for original sources.

“I’ve had the general view that there is a hunger for people my age looking for more intellectual content,” said Mr. Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 after making controversial comments about the lack of women in science and engineering. “I saw it as president of Harvard when I saw C.E.O.’s come up to my wife and want to discuss Hawthorne.” (His wife, Elisa New, is a professor of English at Harvard).

. . .

The interview style, which Big Think’s founders said was derived from a technique used by the filmmaker Errol Morris, places the interviewer in an even smaller closet, behind a shower curtain, hidden from the subject and making the person asking the questions almost an afterthought. The subject hears the questions from a closed-circuit monitor.

The finished product even eliminates the interviewer’s voice, and the questions appear as text on the screen. The goal is to not create a confrontation between interviewer and interviewee, or goad the subject into saying something provocative (but if it happens, that is a bonus.)

. . . more

[C_U_L8R]

1. "DB HOST CANNOT BE FOUND"

looks like they still have some work to do... it breaks under Safari

but the parts i saw look very cool.

[rucky]

2. Sounds like Current. n/t