With a very annoying slogan, "We are what you think," Bigthink.com made its debut this morning in its first day on the internet.
With backers such as Nantucket Nectars founder Tom Scott, and venture capitalists David Frankl and Peter Thiel, along with Larry Summers, the disgraced former President of Harvard, the site's creators, Peter Hopkins and Victoria Brown hope that Bigthink will make a big splash as a meeting place for intellectuals.
Unfortunately, It's more like a fat kid's cannonball.
Using quick jump cuts reminiscent of a Gap commercial, Bigthink shows snippets of commentary by luminaries and nerds alike. But, as it now stands, the site feels very much like a half-built house. The walls are up but the heat's not on, the toilets don't flush and there's no furniture. For example, Under Architecture & Design, they have Zac Posen briefly opining about who he thinks are some of the fashion greats. Posen is truly likable but, couldn't they have gotten someone with a bit more gravitas say, I.M. Pei or, Oscar De La Renta? In choosing which subjects to be fully on-line in time for their debut, Hopkins and Brown have made their priorities very clear; they have no less than three experts each on Economics, Literature and Theater & Film but, they have no experts at all so far in Dance. It just doesn't take all that much to dot one's i's or cross one's t's and the fact that they couldn't get all their topics up by opening day makes the whole concept appear a bit half-baked. Metaphor-mixing aside, the highlights include (rhyme unintentional), Peter Gomes and former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins reading his poems, Questions about Angels and The Lanyard.
Creating an on-line platform for the likes of Anna Devere Smith, Richard Meier, Robert Thurman, and Moby along with many others is actually, quite a wonderful idea. Despite the very low-brow sponsors, ITT Technical Institute and Netwinner.com, an on-line gambling enterprise, the fact alone that Donald Trump and his combover are unlikely to ever make an appearance makes it worth logging on and hoping for more.
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