The Blog

The Gates Foundation is continuing their promotion of stories of global development success through the launch of ViewChange.org this week. The multimedia platform is managed by Link TV and utilizes a back catalog of development-related videos as well as new content procured for the site. The website highlights progress in reducing hunger, poverty and disease in developing nations and is part of the Gates Foundation’s broader, “Living Proof” campaign.

Publicity materials and the launch blog post highlight the innovative semantic technologies powering the site. I will not breakdown all the features, but the platform is a powerful system for relating various forms of contact. You can see in the image below that each video pulls in related videos, news, and actions. The videos come from the ViewChange.org system as well as YouTube. News is from blogs and news sites, all powered by Zemanta. The site uses the Social Actions API to grab results for viewers who want to get involved in the topic of a video. One of the consultants working on the project has a nice write up on the ViewChange.org semantic system.

It is a great initiative and designers and brand consultants Method showcase the same talent that brought us the BBC iPlayer and TEDTalks online. The use of topics as living navigation that pulls in the proper content is novel as well. However, I find the site as a great tool for those working in the field and looking for content, but not an exciting platform for the public. Often, I feel these type of sites make two false assumptions:

1. People are looking for this type of content
2. They want more and more of it

The first is a fallacy that crumbles the minute any NGO staffer looks at web stats for any page beyond their jobs section. People are not clamoring for information on the success of development aid. The problem is not our lack of content, but lack of interest. Compounding the initial content with vast amounts of related content and actions does not make the topic more accessible, but overwhelming. I find the site overwhelms me, even with the simplified design and topic-focused navigation. ViewChange.org is dealing with vast quantities of video content — the difficulty becomes balancing people finding what they are looking for (i.e. NGO worker in need of a compelling video for their World Toilet Day blog post), and the general public who is not necessarily after this content at all, but willing to be wowed. Both audiences are impatient. The semantic technologies are interesting, but they do not solve any existing problem that is keeping people from this content in the first place. Yes, it’s great to have users curate playlits of saved items (though I could not figure out how to add content to my playlist), but who is actually curating, sharing and viewing such playlists? Unless, this is simply a tool for NGO-types. I hope that the site thrives and is not another in the list of “Hub” do-gooder sites that suffer from low traffic, little community interaction, and only preaches to the converted.

Perhaps, I’m being a bit too negative. I suffer from “I’ve seen it all before” syndrome. Thus, I’ll end this post on a positive note and a great lesson from the new site. I was a bit annoyed that ViewChange.org uses its own “Like” and saving functionality rather than soley pushing users to share content in their social networks — meaning, I needed to create an account. I was pleasantly surprised at the clean and slick integration of ubiquitous ID providers like Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL and OpenID that making joining the ViewChange.org community a snap. Bravo!

Finally, this is a video site and it is World Toilet Day. For your consideration…Nigera: Shit Business is Serious Business. Enjoy. (Shit! Why can’t I embed this video?)

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