This, like the new Launchpad features on Mac OSX Lion, is showing an increasing trend toward a portal-like hub. Not only is it an aesthetically pleasing front page, it is giving users instant access to content that would be found on a "community corkboard". Additionally, they're collaborating with big boys such as Yahoo, Wall Street Journal, iTunes, LinkedIN, and Foursquare. Pretty smart and exclusive.
Though I mentioned a similar approach a few months back when talking about Flipboard, streamlining visually interesting access points into the collection on a portal-like landing page could be a great way to get people interested in what you have. When we find text-heavy pages or lists, it's more common to scan the text block, then click somewhere else. But, videos, photos, and other multimedia usually mean lingering longer and processing information faster. In fact, Dr. Lynell Burmack makes a point that youth today averages 22,000 hours of television before they graduate from high school and that "we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text" due to processing data from images simultaneously versus processing data in text in a sequential fashion.
Though I don't think a content inventory of an entire site needs to be focused on visual (especially when considering universal accessibility issues), I do think it's an important approach to keep in mind. Plus, it helps give a fresh and modern feeling to archival collections that may initially be seen as archaic.
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