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

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