Yet another great website has started using SocialSite!

OK, first - you might not have checked out FORA.tv yet, so if you have some free time please just click that link there and come back after you’ve explored a bit. It will take a bit to get decent taste, though, so if you want to wait until you have more time to kick back and really explore I don’t blame you. Read on and I’ll do my best to not waste too much valuable virtual ink describing this increasingly popular, ever-growing treasure-trove of timely, intelligent, fascinating videos which aim to “Fuel the Enlightenment” .

Check out that capture. How can any video site that organizes itself into the categories “The Economy,” “Green,” “Politics,” “Science,” “Technology,” and “Culture” fail to appeal to the enormous collection of thinkers and doers gathered around the internet?  If you’re not lured in by those top five videos (which, ok, may be a little specialized, although “Edible Education“? Yes, please!), right underneath begins the list of featured videos, which cover orgasms, Jesus on a pancake, military suicides, and the possible Skyping habits of Bernie Madoff. Still nothing? OK, try the tag cloud:

I know, right? It would be fun just to come back every little while and watch “Election 2008″ shrink and “The Bailout” grow. Or is that just me?

Regardless, this site is a powerhouse. It takes the success of TED and expands on it, posting new videos of important, active, dynamic speakers all the time, from everywhere, about everything. Such a smart collection, where every video begins with a woman’s voice intoning, “The World… Is Thinking,” brings in a smart audience, as FORA CEO Blaise Zerega recognizes in the video below from a BEET.tv roundtable.

The realization Zerega mentions that “our big value is our audience” has led FORA.tv to a serious engagement with the internet’s community and social-content driven evolution known as Web 2.0. The main FORA.tv site cultivates a free, full-featured membership based community, allowing comments, ratings, and saving favorites while providing feeds, downloads and podcasts. Meanwhile, a variety of the FORA.tv staff write a very cool blog which nicely appreciates and interacts with their audience. The blog breaks news (parnerships with WIRED and The Economist! available on iTunes!) and gives some behind-the-scenes insights about the business while exploring and encouraging the burgeoning FORA.tv community. Their regular “Twanks” feature, as an example, showcases the best weekly tweets about the site and even provides capsule bios of the tweeters who tweeted them.

All that said, I feel very happy to announce that the FORA.tv blog has begun using our always powerful, always flexible SocialSite widget system to enhance and follow-through on their commitment to their community while promoting the FORA.tv content and brand. Now they and their readers can see, from the blog page (or wherever anyone embeds it!), all the twitters, diggs, delicious, flickr photos and inbound blogs mentioning FORA.tv, as well as blog and YouTube posts. With our new administration features FORA will be able to track all the activity the widget displays - so they can not only find the best tweets, but see who’s tweeting most, who’s dugg them over and over again, and who’s written them and their content up repeatedly or started a fan blog. They have a growing audience, they have a smart audience, and I selfishly and sincerely applaud their smart choice of ThingFo’s SocialSite to interact with and encourage it.

Do you have a smart audience? Then I selfishly and sincerely urge you to let them know you think so with your own SocialSite widget. Request an invitation today.