I spoke with Jordan Goldman, the twenty-fix year old founder of Unigo.com [1] and a recent grad of Wesleyn University [2], last Tuesday about their new site and how it can be used as a cross-campus platform for information and concerns -- particularly in these scary economic times. They were recently written up on the New York Times Magazine [3] -- a pretty impressive feat for a web site four days after it was launched!
Unigo does for college info what blogs are doing for news: providing real-time news for millions of people that used to be the captive domain of old-line publishing companies. Jordan wanted to create a resource that reflected campus-life in real time from the perspective of students -- as opposed to the array of hard-copy guides that are generated from the college's (usually their communication office's) perspective like Princeton Review [4] that take years to put together.
For a year before the site was launched, Unigo was generating content from students at 250 colleges and universities across the country. Unigo hired two interns at each school who recruited students from all grades, gender, sexual, and political orientation to report on their schools. In the end, 10% of the students at these schools -- more than 15,000 students -- participated as content generators for the site. Unigo's staff of 18 people are all 22-25 year olds.
When I asked Jordan why they created a stand-alone site, rather than, say, an app on Facebook, he replied, "We wanted to start from a base of good content that reflected a broad cross-section of opinions from college students. Facebook might be more organic but might leave people out."
What caught my eye in these scary economic times (how often have you heard that phrase in the last few weeks?) is their new efforts to bridge the divide between college campuses. Campus life is almost by design a silo and although students may have friends on different campuses, they rarely talk about larger social issues between campuses.
Unigo is developing new content areas, specifically forums and blogs, in the next few weeks for students to talk about specific issues -- like student loans -- across campuses. They are also aggregating student newspapers acoss schools and have posted in their Featured Articles [5] section information on student finances and budgets. This will enable students to see what other student newspapers are writing about on issues like how to help afford college this year and next.
Unigo is a really interesting idea, and it will be fun to watch as Jordan and company learn and improve on ways to connect students on and across campuses.
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