Brijit on The American Scene

Reihan Salam, whom I first met in the days just before Brijit launched to friends and family last summer, is going to make me blush. This wasn’t enough to keep me from sharing his post, of course. Any introductions you want to make would be much appreciated, Reihan. And thanks for the kinds words.

To the point that we should re-launch the site without the writer payment component, I think it’s safe to say that when (if?) Brijit comes through on the other side of this challenging time, I’d expect our editorial compensation structure to be, well, different. This jives with the vast majority of the feedback we’ve been receiving, from Brijiteers and others. Exactly what that looks like is still a work in progress.

I headed up 95 from DC this morning to attend the second day of the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association’s annual Capital Connection event. Brijit wouldn’t be a good fit for most of the investors here even under the best circumstances. Nonetheless, there are a handful of potential investors and strategic partners that I’m hoping to see today.

Site’s Back Up, New Abstract Is Coming

Thanks to Brent Thorington for stepping up on Memorial Day and getting Brijit back up. And thanks to Hurricane Electric for being responsive, too.

I’ll write the abstract later this evening, but for now, check out the New York TImes’ obituary of Sydney Pollack, who died today at 73.

Brijit.com is Temporarily Down

A power outage at our co-location facility late last night caused the main Brijit site to go down. I’m aware of the problem, but without a team in place (with the technology expertise that comes with it), it may take a while longer for the site to come back up. Sorry about that, folks. I hope everyone has a meaningful Memorial Day.

Make That “the Award-Winning Brijit.com,” Please.

The good folks over at TheMorningNews.com has honored Brijit with a 2008 Editors’ Award for Online Excellence. Here’s the citation:

“Favorite Helping Hand When in Content Quicksand

A friend once pointed to a foot-tall stack of New Yorkers in his apartment and said he was a few months behind, but was determined to read every article. A praiseworthy effort, for sure, but not everyone has that kind of fortitude. For us, skimming the issue and reading only the articles that beckon is enough; and thanks to the now sadly defunct Brijit, we don’t even have to do that. This service presents a 100-word abstract (with a rating!) of every article from a bevy of magazines, helping you decide if the article is worth the time investment. Alternately, you could read only the abstracts, get dressed up, and remnick cocktail-party conversations all night long.”

This appears about two-thirds of the way down the page. Check out the full piece here.

Brijit on NYTimes.com

Since we launched last October, Brijit has received an overwhelmingly positive response in the media. Marci Alboher writes the Shifting Careers blog for the New York Times, and first mentioned Brijit not long after we launched. I spoke with her earlier this week. Apparently she came back after some time out of town, and told a colleague how useful she found Brijit as a tool for catching up with things she may have missed while she was gone. But alas…

Brijit is featured today in Marci’s blog; we’re currently the lead post on Shifting Careers. Thanks for sharing Brijit with your readers, Marci. Here’s the bit I was most jazzed about:

“The comments to this post are great reading — users of the site offer their suggestions on how to tweak Brijit’s business model and one of the site’s writers weighs in on why the site is appealing to contributors.”

That’s you, Brijit fans. Please don’t hesitate to comment on nytimes.com and tell the world how much you miss the 100-word version.

Writer Payments Are On the Way

Checks went out yesterday afternoon; PayPal payments went out last evening. These payments cover everything Brijit published this month through May 15. Thanks again to all our Brijiteers.

David Breashears’ Storm Over Everest

Now here, on Brijit. Thanks to Brijiteer Adrienne Jenkins for allowing me to publish her abstract without a fee.

New Abstract On Brijit. Anyone Else Want To Write One?

Great feedback everyone. Thanks for the terrific show of support. Very helpful as I continue my conversations with potential investors and partners.

I’ve decided that, at least for this week, I’m going to try to do an abstract or two a day — only good stuff. It’s obviously a poor substitute for a fully-staffed Brijit, but it’s better than nothing, and it just feels like the right thing to do as try to find a home for the service while simultaneously closing it down. Here’s one I wrote last night: “Can a Dead Brand Live Again?” by Rob Walker in the 18 May 2008 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

If anyone else wants to write an abstract of something great that they read, watched, or listened to on one of our 100-plus sources, please let me know. If there’s enough interest, I’ll put a process in place to include abstracts from the Brijit community. I think I can handle edits on about a dozen abstracts a day. Leave a comment here if you’re in. Would love to have you. Tell your friends!

To be clear, though (and I don’t even have the technology resources at the moment to change the text of the Brijit site to reflect this): WE ARE NOT PAYING FOR ABSTRACTS AT THIS TIME. Many in the comments have suggested that the site could thrive without the $5 fee — we’re about to find out, albeit on a small scale. I hope you won’t let it dissuade you from writing.

Also, you may have noticed that you’ve stopped receiving your email digests from Brijit. Sorry about that — we know it’s a great product, and if we can figure out a way to come through on the other side, we’ll be makign them a priority from a business development perspective. But we’ve spoken with our friends at SilverPop, our email newsletter provider, and given the situation, we both agreed that we needed to stop sending Brijit emails, at least for now.

Your thoughts on a Save Brijit campaign?

Trying to get a handle on the pros and cons of a Save Brijit campaign of some sort. I’m heartened by all the great feedback here and around the Web. Would need to happen by Monday, for sure, and ideally by COB today. A Facebook group? A petition? Any thoughts? Ideas and volunteers wanted!

Can You Feel the Love?

Yesterday was awful. Out of financial runway, Brijit stopped publishing abstracts for after more than eight months of continuous service to our growing community. Ripped the band-aid right off!

Personally, at least, today’s a much better day. The outpouring of affection and support around closing Brijit, at least temporarily, has been amazing. One of my favorites:

Here’s Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb: “In a tragic and surprising turn of events, Brijit, one of the most interesting startups on the web, has announced that the company has run out of money…”

Thanks, Marshall. You’ve always had nice things to say about our service, and I appreciate it.

Comments like this one from a loyal reader named Gabe: “I visited Brijit 2-3 times a day. Bottom line is that out of the gazillions of sites out there, there are only around 5 (and Brijit is one of them) where I’m guaranteed to be given quick and easy access to more than 5 articles that I’ll find interesting.”

Also plenty of notes of encouragement from friends, acquaintances and total strangers. Great stuff.

Professionally, I’m pleased to say, I also received inquiries from a handful of credible potential investors and partners, upon which I’m already following up. Long shots, to be sure, but worth a shot nonetheless.

Today I’m feeling the love. Please keep it coming!

Honk If You Love Brijit!

We’ve been proud to work with so many talented and dedicated writers over the past 6+ months. Together we’ve published nearly 16,000 abstracts, covered more than 100 sources, and provided a service that’s proven valuable to hundreds of thousands of people.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we’ve run out of money, and can no longer afford to pursue our vision of adapting great long-form content for a short-form world, at least not as a stand-alone company. As recently as yesterday morning, we thought we had the funding in place to continue our work together. But as it turns out, we don’t.

I’m sorry to share that we are ceasing publication of Brijit, at least for the time being, and possibly for good. Beginning today, I’ll be blogging here, and will keep you up to date on our status. I’m still working hard to find a home for Brijit and our community of smart readers, listeners, watchers, and writers. In the meantime, I hope you’ll stick with us on this blog.

Writer payments for all May abstracts published through the 15th will be made next week. As always, we appreciate the good work. And please don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email or comments here on the blog.

Megan McArdle Likes Brijit.

Megan McArdle, self-styled “the world’s tallest female econoblogger,” just published an interesting take on Brijit on her blog Asymmetrical Information over at The Atlantic. A good deal of virtual ink (and some real ink, too) has been spilled about Brijit since we launched 6+ months ago, but Megan’s the first one to dig into the economics of our writers’ area. To wit:

“The Brijit concept… take people who have time but no money, and marry them to people who have money but no time. Or rather, pay the people who have a lot of time on their hands to read stuff, and then tell the people who have money but no time what they really need to look at, and what they can safely skip.”

I met up with Megan a few weeks back near our offices here in DC. She is, indeed, quite tall. She also grasped intuitively how Brijit has created a system to take advantage of a classic arbitrage opportunity created by information overload. Nice.

Digg for the Rest of Us

As a user, I find Digg worthless. Whew. It feels so good to say it out loud!

Of course, as the CEO of a small-but-growing online media company, I’d give my left pinky toe for Digg’s traffic. But I don’t find the site helpful, and I’d be reluctant to put my name on its virtual masthead, because so much of what floats to the top of Digg is, well, crap like this.

This isn’t me being an elitist, mind you. I love Digg in theory (communism works in theory, right?); the idea of a community of individuals working independently to promote great content is actually near and dear to my heart. But in practice, Digg as it’s currently constituted is no meaningful filter – it’s little more than a sieve. Sure, you’ll find an occasional gold nugget – but you’ll spend hours in hip waders with your hands in the muck trying to find it. And the irony is that the bigger Digg gets, the less valuable it becomes, because more and more muck is being poured into the system.

This reality means Digg is part of the information overload problem, not part of the solution. The signal-to-noise ratio has deteriorated to the point that the filter needs a filter. And doesn’t that defeat the purpose? I mean, who’s got the time?

As it turns out, we do. At noon Eastern today, Brijit will begin covering Digg. Digg, you ask? Alongside the New Yorker and This American Life and The Daily Show and Pitchfork? You bet. There’s great content there, and in the context of Brijit, we think Digg can be a valuable resource for the rest of us, busy people without the time or the inclination to go story-fishing in an ocean of crap.

Brijit takes Digg’s most popular, pulls out the most interesting and substantial items, and sets our community of smart readers, writers, and editors to work boiling them down to 100 words or fewer. And while we’ll credit that we found it in Digg, every abstract links back to the original source, to save you time.

We’re also adding coverage of YouTube and Techmeme today, for different reasons. YouTube has a high clutter factor, too, but it’s search-driven in a way that Digg isn’t, which makes for a better experience for the casual user – you dive in, find what you’re looking for, and hop out. Here the Brijit abstract serves more of a serendipity and discovery function for people with neither the time nor the inclination to visit YouTube every day. As for Techmeme, it’s a pretty terrific algorithmic filter, valuable in almost every way, and we think that a wider audience of non-tech folks would appreciate some of what bubbles up there each day, in a shorter format.

So there you have it. Brijit is covering Digg, YouTube, and Techmeme, so busy people don’t have to work so hard. We hope you’ll let us know what you think.

Respect Your Librarian. But Feel Free To Google.

I spoke at a gathering of librarians last week. Thanks to Jill O’Neill at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) for including me. The 50-year-old organization “for groups that aggregate, organize and facilitate access to information” was hosting a one-day forum on The Future of Bibliographic Control, and wanted Brijit there to talk about user-generated content. I’m always happy to introduce Brijit to a new audience, and with Philadelphia only a quick Amtrak ride away, I was glad to do it.

The other speaker on user-generated content was Susan Chun, the founder of Steve, the art museum social tagging project. Susan has set out to make museum collections more accessible by creating a tool that allows professionals, enthusiasts, and laypeople alike to tag items in more mainstream, less technical ways. Kind of a Del.icio.us for museums. Love it.

She pegged her talk around an email she’d seen while working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After hearing the story, it’s hard to imagine anyone questioning the value of collaborative, consumer-focused tagging, especially to institutions with large collections.

The author of the email in question was trying to locate a specific painting. He could describe what it looked like in some detail: a “renaissance” painting with an “hourglass” on a “table” in front of a “man.” But the author knew neither the artist’s name nor the title of the painting. And despite the fact that the Met had a terrific academic record of the painting, replete with provenance going back more than a century, Susan was only able to locate it by asking around among the experts she knew in the museum. Tag it with terms people use, and finding this painting is a cinch. Tag it exclusively with traditional bibliographic information, and it remains hidden.

Project Steve and Brijit are attacking different problems in different ways, but the overarching philosophy is the same. Give people the ability to collaborate and be creative within a structured environment, stand back, and watch the magic happen. My presentation on the hybrid editorial model (slides here soon) highlighted this point.

As I told the NFAIS audience, I know practically nothing about what they were discussing most of the day. I’m no expert on the library-publisher supply chain. I’m unfamiliar with the alphabet soup of industry organizations and projects, from NISO and UKSG’s KBART working group to the OCLC or the EEBO. And I’m not at all interested in whether a particular document is considered a monograph or a serial. And neither is (almost) anybody else.

We’re lucky to have librarians and systems that have put us on a firm curatorial footing for generations. But they have to negotiate legacy systems in a way that we Web-native organizations don’t. I don’t envy the task of trying to shoehorn modern content creation and distribution into standards of a bygone era.

One of the other presenters talked of her frustration with a colleague who lamented the fact that people check Google before the library’s own catalog system. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

The metadata of ISSN X, volume this, page that, is not meaningful to the vast majority of people. Metadata at Brijit means the basics of how most people want their content in an increasingly online, mobile world: title, author, source, date, and TAGS. On an article by article basis. And everything with a link back to the underlying material (where available), so that you can go right to it. We’ve built Brijit to dovetail with consumer behavior, not fight it. It’s a search-driven, link-based, short-form world, and we’re just living (and working) in it.

Are We Really Still Talking About the Merits of Linking in 2008?

It was all I could do not to write a headline laced with profanity, such is the depth of my frustration. (My colleagues talked me down.)

Brijit has enjoyed a great run of mainstream media visibility over the past couple of months, by pretty much any standard. We were on the cover of the Life section of USA Today, the lead example in a piece titled “Services cater to our speeded-up lives.” We got a nice mention on MSNBC in a story called “How to dig out from the information avalanche.” And last week we appeared in the April issue of Wired, which identified Brijit as a prime example of “The Human Touch,” one of “nine trends driving business in 2008.” Great stuff for any company, especially a startup like ours. Just one problem: none of these actually linked to www.brijit.com!

Now, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but these particular masters of mainstream media are killing me. According to Comscore, MSNBC had 28 million unique visitors in January. USA Today’s sites had more than 8 million, and Wired 2 million. These are big brands with big audiences, the kind of audiences that entrepreneurs like me would ordinarily salivate over. If some small fraction of these audiences finds its way to one of these articles, and some small fraction of that fraction clicks through to visit Brijit, and some small fraction of that fraction likes what they see, sticks around, and shares Brijit with their friends, well, that’s a big deal for a site like ours. Which is why it’s so enraging to be written about but NOT linked to.

When we launched late last year, it was a piece by Frank Ahrens in the The Washington Post that brought us to the world’s attention. More than four months later, we continue to see a trickle of referrals from this story. Why? Because on first reference, there’s a link to Brijit. Now, The Washington Post is about as mainstream as mainstream media gets, but they get it. This isn’t complex neuroscience. This is common courtesy. Hell, this is the Golden Rule we’re talking about: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If you’re a publisher, you want other publishers linking to you. If you’re a reader, you want easy access to whatever it is you want to read, listen to, or watch. It’s pretty simple. So what, exactly, is wrong with USA Today, MSNBC, Wired, and the host of other outlets that still haven’t instituted link-friendly standards? Are they so desperate to keep people on their sites that they’re willing to treat their readers with such disrespect? Do they think not linking is the key to consumer satisfaction? Really?

I know this is well-worn ground. It’s pretty common knowledge at this point that the link is the coin of the realm online. The blog as a medium is built on a foundation that linking is good. So is Google. So is Yahoo!. And so is Brijit. And when Tom Rosenstiel, who supervised The State of the News Media 2008 report for the Project for Excellence in Journalism, goes on Bob Garfield’s On the Media and declares that “your website should be a way-station, a place that can help me get to where I want to go. If it were a dead-end street, a cul-de-sac, it would be less useful to me,” you’d think that everyone was on board.

They’re not.

Brijit in Wired!

The April issue of Wired magazine is online, with a big piece on their 9 big trends for 2008. Number 9? “The Human Touch,” featuring Brijit as the lead example of “ventures that are using people, rather than algorithms, to filter the Internet’s wealth of information.”

They Love Us In Canada!

Jonathan Kay of The National Post wrote a killer piece on Brijit today. He’s coined the word “Brijiteer,” which I absolutely love, to describe a Brijit writer. And he and his colleagues in Toronto are apparently engaged in a three-way “Brijit Summary Smackdown,” another phrase I plan to adopt with all due speed, as we’d love to see friends challenging friends to these little semi-intellectual contests across the Web. Good stuff.

As the CEO of a startup, I can’t help but smile at the comparison to YouTube and Facebook:

“…every once and a while, a new web site comes along and changes my life. It happened with Youtube in 2005, and then again with Facebook last year. And now I’m going through the same throes of electronic passion with a new love, Brijit.”

And in another sign that we’re moving in the right direction, Kay’s also using Brijit as a verb:

“I am hooked on Brijit like electronic crack. I no longer Facebook, or Blackberry, or IM. Instead, I Brijit.”

In all, they love us in Canada!

Brijit for Facebook Will Save You Time, Make You Smarter, and Earn You Money. Seriously.

I’ve tried really hard not to endlessly flack Brijit in this space. But today we’re introducing Brijit for Facebook, and I can’t help myself — it’s just really cool, and I hope you’ll indulge me.

My 100-word abstract:

Wish you had the time to read cover-to-cover or never miss an episode? So do we. At Brijit, we gather 100 great sources and boil them down to 100 words to save you time. Now Brijit for Facebook lets your friends be your guide to the world’s best content, as we make it easy to share what you’re reading, listening to, and watching. Find it on Brijit, and your friends can see it on Facebook. And if you want to write for fun or profit, Brijit will even pay you $5 or more every time we publish one of your abstracts. It’s that simple.

Kudos to Benjamin Dorr, Allan Chan, Brent Thorington and Richard Ponton for bringing Brijit for Facebook to life. They’ve done some pretty interesting and innovative things here.

EASY SHARING INTEGRATED BEYOND FACEBOOK — For starters, Brijit for Facebook is one of the relatively few applications that’s robustly integrated with a site outside of Facebook. Once you’ve opted in, your reading on Brijit leads seamlessly and directly to recommendations on Facebook. There are no additional steps. No share buttons to press. No comments to tack on. If you read it on Brijit, your friends can see it on Brijit for Facebook. And if they read it, you can see it — it’s a mutual-recommendation tool that requires practically no effort.

A TIME-SAVER, NOT A TIME-SUCK — From SuperPoke to Scrabulous, the vast majority of Facebook applications, fun though they may be, are for wasting time. Brijit for Facebook is all about giving you your time back. We’re 100 percent committed to developing the best possible interface for dealing handling hundreds of sources and thousands of subjects. Today’s release is our first shout at it; additional customization is coming. We also think we’re on the early side of the maturation-of-Facebook trend with an efficient, easy-to-use service that takes full advantage of all of social media’s best traits.

A WAY TO GET PAID — We’re not familiar with too many Facebook apps that actually enable you to earn money easily, but Brijit for Facebook does just that. Users are just one click away from claiming any assignment they want to abstract. Facebook users now have easy access to the Brijit writers area, where they can earn $5 or more for every abstract they write that we publish. And of course, they can show off what they write for their friends with no further effort.

In the end, we think of Brijit for Facebook as an extension of everything we’re doing at Brijit. On Brijit for Facebook, your friends become your well-read friends, and everyone gets just a little bit smarter. We hope you’ll check it out, share it with your friends, and let us know what you think.

Whither the Wisdom of Crowds? Of course not.

I never thought I’d write these words: Thank you, Commander Taco.

CmdrTaco is the screen name of Rob Malda, the 31-year-old founder of slashdot.org. Slashdot, for the uninitiated (i.e. most of us), is a pioneering technology news community, a self-styled “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.” site.

So why the shout out? Yesterday Brad Stone wrote in the New York Times’ Bits blog that Malda’s skeptical of the mainstream value of Digg and other wisdom-of-crowds aggregations sites. Malda’s rationale, is, well, rational:

“I try not to paint Digg as my arch-nemesis. The Digg method and Digg community are a wider audience than Slashdot,” he said. “But with sites like Digg, it’s the wisdom of the crowds or the tyranny of the mob. You never know what you’re going to get.”

Put aside the dig at Digg, and CmdrTaco is reminding us that no single form of aggregation holds all the answers. Hence the shout-out here.

There’s extraordinary power in user-generation. From Amazon recommendations to sharing a la Digg or Deli.cio.us, the wisdom of crowds can be an incredible tool.

Of course there’s value in the algorithm. Google uses straight-up algorithm to put relevant information at our fingertips, and its worked out pretty well for them, and generally, for us.

And traditional top-down editorial control is excellent, too. Check out the Sports Illustrated or the Wall Street Journal or The Daily Show, and the value of professional, editorial control becomes pretty clear.

So why, in a world where we have such terrific aggregation options, would anyone settle for just one kind?

Well, more and more, we’re not. A host of companies, including Brijit, are making some variation of a hybrid production model part of their core businesses. We think that’s good news for lovers of great content.

USA Today: Brijit Saves You Time.

Brijit’s the lead anecdote in a piece in today’s USA Today by Marco della Cava.

I’m pretty ambivalent about our service being lumped together with an online speed dating site and an overpriced exercise machine, but the idea that Brijit exists in large part to save people time comes across loud and clear.

Small and Independent Publishers Rejoice! OpenID Will Set You Free. Maybe.

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has it that Yahoo! is joining OpenID:

“The rumor last week was that Google (as well as Verisign and IBM) were mulling over the idea of joining the OpenID 2.0 single sign-on framework. But the real news comes today, as Yahoo and its roughly 250 million user IDs officially jump on the bandwagon. Today, there are only approximately 120 million valid OpenID accounts. In one move, Yahoo more than triples that number.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb reasonably rains on the parade a bit:

“Yahoo! announced this morning that the company will authenticate the identities of its 248 million users if they chose to login to OpenID supporting sites with their Yahoo! ID.

Like the AOL announcement of roughly the same thing in February of last year, the key question is whether Yahoo! will do anything substantive with OpenID or whether, like the AOL announcement, this will just be window dressing to legitimize advocates of OpenID. AOL’s support for OpenID appears to have resulted in little more.

Though there’s every reason to hope that today’s Yahoo! announcement will lead to ongoing, meaningful advocacy of OpenID by the company and then a future wherein Yahoo! sites accept OpenID from other providers – there’s also plenty of reason to be concerned that neither will occur and that Yahoo! interests are really only served by spreading the use of Yahoo! ID further around the web.”

Let’s grab onto that “every reason to hope” part. Let’s say Yahoo! turns out to be a fervent advocate of OpenID and not a mere press-release pusher. In this case, this is awesome, awesome news for small and independent publishers and everyone who might enjoy their content.

One important impediment to audience enlargement is the registration wall. It’s effectively a big sign that says “go away,” unless you’re prepared to take the time and energy to sign up. For many, it’s just not worth the aggravation, and people move on. Rapid adoption of OpenID would go a long way toward eliminating this frustration.

In building Brijit, we’ve been relentlessly focused on how we can help people find and access the world’s best content. We’ve found that much of this content is produced by small and independent publishers. It follows, then, that any tool that emerges that makes it easy for big audiences to interact seamlessly across websites (while attending to sticky privacy issues) is a good thing.

Put another way: if all goes well, pretty soon more than 350 million people could be walking around with skeleton keys to “walled gardens” across the web. Now all the publishers have to do is figure out to attract users beyond their core communities without alienating those communities. And of course, we think Brijit can be helpful here.

Live From DC! Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Brijit!

I was interviewed yesterday by Nick O’Neill of Social Times.

If you’re interested in me, Brijit, or social media, you’ll probably find something valuable here.

When I was running Business Forward, my local DC business magazine, one of my favorite parts of the job was doing our monthly Twenty Questions interviews. There’s something extremely satisfying about conducting a good interview — the ebb and flow of it, getting the subject to enlighten and surprise. Giving a good interview is just as fun, and I have to admit, I think this one qualifies. I make a pretty good case for what we’re building at Brijit and why what we’re doing is important. I always have some trepidation about sitting down in front of the camera, but in this case I’m pretty pleased with the result. Nick, I hope you feel good about it, too.

Check Out BigThink, and Think About the Big Trends

A hearty welcome to BigThink, a self-styled “YouTube for ideas, which made a splash today in a NY Times piece, and then this evening on TechCrunch.

Tim Arango pegged his Times story around BigThink’s investors (former Treasury Secretary and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, among others), and painted a pretty Ivory Tower, highfalutin picture of the venture. Erick Schonfeld goes more than 800 words in his evenhanded look on TechCrunch, making fair criticisms of the site’s interface, and comparing it with FORA.tv. (Disclosure — I know Don Baer, one of FORA.tv’s board members.)

Kudos to BigThink founder Peter Hopkins on the launch, and the great coverage.

But the more interesting story, the one I would have liked to see in the Times or TechCrunch, is the trend story. BigThink is an example of a company carving out a quality-content business in a post-YouTube, post-Digg, lewd-and-loopy-win world. Whether or not BigThink’s model is exactly the right one, or if they’ll execute, remains to be seen. But they’re trying to do something interesting, and I can’t help but applaud the effort.

Anyone who’s spent any time around Brijit will understand why I like BigThink conceptually:

They’re embracing unique, smart content with an eye toward making it accessible to a mainstream audience. They don’t seem to be dumbing it down.

They’re taking a hybrid approach to content creation. They seem to be committing to high quality by employing internal editors and house-produced segments, while at the same time seeking to tap into all benefits of community-generated content and the wisdom of crowds.

They’re looking at big long-form ideas from trusted sources and boiling them down for a short-form world.

I sense a trend…