Unigo: Student-powered college advice

At South By Southwest Interactive in Austin Texas, earlier this month — inside the bloggers lounge — I ran into Julia Kaganskiy, the social media and community manager for Unigo.com.

If you haven’t heard of Unigo, you will. It’s a crowdsourced college guide that offers honest appraisals of life at hundreds of U.S. colleges, including the ability to find out what it’s like to major in a particular subject on a college campus.

Crowdsourcing doesn’t always work, but when users know their subject — and college students know their campuses — it can produce a more useful, authentic and accurate picture than that produced by traditional information sources. Julia says putting an editorial filter on crowdsourced content “sets it apart” and increases the signal level, and I think a lot of sites are finding the same thing.

The New York Times Magazine had a good feature on Unigo last fall.

You’ll notice that my fill light starts to flake out toward the end of our conversation. (That’s the price of being a one-person production crew.)

Watch or embed the video on Vimeo.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.