Bigthink.com is a video based website showing interviews from prominent people in the industry explaining their ideas and concepts. This covers many areas. Two main category areas are split between Meta data and physical data. The Meta data shows different categories such as identity, inspiration, outlook and the future and other Meta data information. The physical area covers topics such as business and economics, science and technology, and history.
They don’t have over 6,499 ‘ideas’ online at the moment, and have plenty of comments against the videos that are there so far. The advanced search option allows you to search within different date ranges and time periods; plus you can select which categories you want to search within. Interestingly, you can also select the type of idea; which can be; “all” the options; a question; or a statement. And what type of media you’re looking for, which include audio, video and slideshows.
For example clicking on the experts link under science and technology; the top three videos that I saw were: “everyday environmentalism” by Graham hill, the founder of treehugger.com and “writing about science” by Steven Pinker, environmental psychologist and professor at Harvard university.
Big thinker seems to rely on 10 key questions. They state that their goal is to get at something deeper, to draw out a guests personality and interests, to get them thinking beyond the usual fare of nearsighted punditry we’ve become used to. With that in mind, the 10 questions were designed to be the backbone of every big think interview.
Jonathan Camp 