SuTree
is an interesting site, launched about 6 months ago, whose aim it is to
educate and entertain using the medium of online video.
The initial offering back then was a simple listing of
instructional
videos.
Since that time the site has received good reviews and lots of
feedback,
both positive and negatively constructive.
SuTree is still a fairly
early development in perhaps the most important Web 2.0 venue –
education.
Aggregating Knowledge
This aspect of the Web has been woefully underdeveloped, and
I actually root for any development aimed at tackling the immense task
of aggregating knowledge.
Now SuTree has stepped up their development
by growing their service organically through feedback and added
features.
According to the site statistics SuTree now has 11322
instructional
videos via 259 sources. Their categories cover the gambit from cool
brain games and electronics to travel and sports.
SuTree is featured on
CrunchBase
and has been covered by briefly on several other prominent
blogs.
Their
competitors in this sparsely occupied venue are: Sclipo, Scouta and 5Min.
The chief difference is that SuTree is
not really as much of a “videopedia” as some of the others and in my
view their content is slightly better (Sclipo is very good
too).
Latest Feature Additions
Here
is the short list of SuTree’s latest and greatest additional features:
-
Courses – These specific sets
of instructional
videos are topical and are essentially created by people who consider
themselves experts in a field.Each creator has great flexibility in
tailoring these courses and virtually any subject matter can be
presented effectively and efficiently on SuTree.
- People – Personal profiles of
information from personal data to interests and topics and tagging
- Videos – The number of video
segments has been
doubled with a vision of indexing every instructional video online into
the SuTree system.
- Games for your brain – SuTree
has added a great selection of cognitive deleopment games for everyone
from children to adults.
- Points and Heroes – Registered
users receive
points for various activities that can be used tobuy icons and share
them with friends. Eventually, top users will be asked to be
moderators.
- SuTree Search Box – IE7 and
FF2 users can now add the SuTree search box to their browsers.
SuTree’s new RSS, widgets, wrap and send, design and enhanced
upload
capability round out this release of enhancements. All in all the
features are not staggeringly advanced but actually appropriate and in
a natural progression for such a startup.
Conclusions
These types of sites can and will be fantastically useful on
the
coming Web. SuTree has a well rounded and essentially quality set of
instructional videos on board already, and the list surely will
continue to grow.
I really can’t say enough about sites that organize
and attempt to aggregate knowledge and SuTree is one of the best at
this.
The down side for any user generated site is always
credibility and
SuTree is certainly not immune. If the site really wants to make
headway – it will take collaboration on a rather massive
scale.
The
long tail of video data and courses on the Web – is absolutely
staggering. Aggregating the different formats, making the necessary
contacts, dealing with copyright issues and essentially getting
academia to support the site will be SuTree’s biggest hurdles.
Personally, I hope they can do it where others (including me)
have
gotten mired down under the weight of it.
This is a much more labor and
time intensive task than it appear to be, but at least this startup has
a clean and useful interface and a good foundation for an educational
platform.
Phil Butler is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
