The appeal

To get you right up to speed, Current TV appeals to me because it brings the best of its online user-submitted video into the living room, and using the online voting polls to quality-filter the content (ala digg-style). Most of the video I had been watching on the channel was documentary, which is again something which appeals to me, and I happened to catch the ‘Tribes’ series over the weekend, which was interesting but I won’t be going in to that in this post.

I hadn’t previously been aware of the current.com site, and this was one of the few occasions where I went to the website after hearing about it on the TV, of all things! The website itself is what I would describle as a media community. Some of the features there are clearly geared towards documentary film makers, and part of the site’s attraction for those people must be that if their work is voted on enough, then it makes it to the TV broadcast.

I signed up and noticed a couple of things which kind of prove my above point.

As you can see, in my ‘doctored’ screenshot there is a right side bar which has a few interesting things:

1. First up is user activity, and this little box tells me that I’ve done nothing yet. Cool.
2. Second is the achievements, which tells me if any of my submitted stuff gets on TV. This is where you’ll see that for film makers or other contributors, getting your stuff on TV adds a little kudos to your profile.
3. Lastly is a little round-up box which generally sumarises my account activity.

So you can see immediately what the website is trying to do to engage its visitors, adding a little bit of cool and competition to get people involved.

Why is this cool?

Each user-submitted piece of content has its own page with blog-style comments, and those are also kept track of in the User Profile where you earn kudos for cool comments.

Overall, the user controls are quite complex, and have origins in a number of different media sites but I think once you aquaint yourself with the site these become less of the problem and more of the purpose of the site – you can for instance, follow themes such as ‘politics’ ‘tech’ and even people who submit good content that you can ‘follow’, and all this will show up in your own ‘My Current’ section. With most websites, complexity like this is shunned for one reason or another – usually for fear of turning the user away- but in the case of Current, it’s absolutely the magic which holds the whole thing together. I think this is going to be the kind of website we shall see more of in the future, and this could be a move away from the short attention span that plagues the use of the internet in general.

Actually, Since first drafting this post a while ago, I’ve had several submissions make it to be on the TV news. This sort of participation is very similar to digg, and the easiest for regular non-documentary maker members can contribute.

A couple of problems still exist with the Current.com mode however.

1. The main page encourages voting based off a one quick eyeball of the content, much like judging a book by its cover. See below for a pic.

2. There’s no way to check for duplicate content such as digg, since news is reported on many different websites all with their own pictures and commentary. Occasionally, you’ll see the same piece of news crop up several times submitted by different users. I’ve even found the search a bit difficult to use in checking recent submissions.

So, have you viewed Current TV or used their website? What is your verdict on their approach? Personally I really enjoy the Vanguard Journalism topic, which the pods are usually created by the channel producers. It’s one to watch out for, because the topics they cover are out of the main stream media. At least for that part, the title of this post becomes not an oxymoron, and for that I feel TV can still have relevance to play in real media output into society.

Edit:
Current.com recently teamed up with Twitter to feature ‘Hack the Debate’
You can follow Current on twitter here.