TED Talks

This post has been a long time a brewin’.  In aniticipation I created a little ‘Great TED Talks’ sidebar over there which will have a rotating (and growing) list of some of my favourites.

First, what does TED stand for?  What’s it all about?

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

(retrieved from the TED.com FAQ)

My friend Matty G first tuned me into these talks and I have been all over them ever since.  We used them at BrainBoost Tutoring to engage students in the discussion of complex or philosophical ideas – because the presentations tend to be quite engaging, it was difficult for anyone to tune them out.  They had a way of making learning fun…not that it isn’t normally, but this was like ninja-style learning, as if you really had no idea what was going on, but all you knew was that you really wanted to be part of the conversation.  Your brain was always going, ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ or, ‘NO WAY!’, and you would generally have the urge to shout out something.  We even occassionally had students asking to pause the video so they could say something (not a common occurence in most classrooms where videos=sleep).

In any case, because the ideals of TED (a non-profit organization) are both lofty and inclusive (i.e. ideas have the power to change the world; they are free; so please spread them!), they really encourage others to use the videos in pretty well any way they see fit (so long as you don’t profit from them directly) – there is a list of ways you can help the TED mission on the site.  If you’re interested in something, I don’t know, maybe ‘urban design’, you just search for it there and at least a half a dozen videos pop up.  Or maybe you need a 20 minute break, just take a stumble through their themed archives and you are sure to find something extremely interesting.  Some pretty big names from just about every field you can think of have gone at some point to the annual TED conference and wowed the audience; notables include: Bill Clinton, E. O. Wilson, Dave Eggers, Jeff Bezos, David Kelley, Louise Leakey, Richard Branson, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Steven Pinker, Dan Dennett, Silvia Earle, Malcolm Gladwell, and my oh my, the list goes on.

For marketers, you pretty much have to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on product design.

A ha!  Never mind!  I’ve learned to embed! Scratch that.  I most definitely have not learned how to embed video.   You will need to click through on the links provided. Damn you strikethrough!

And below here is one of my favourite talks that I forgot about until recently.  It is weird and wacky, but completely representative of the kind of creative and revolutionary thinking that goes on in the minds of TED speakers.  And best of all, it’s short if you only have a little time to relax and unwind.

Enjoy!

Update: New TED Talk from Evan Williams on How Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses. http://tinyurl.com/ba4uu7
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Understanding twitter

A couple of blog posts/articles I’ve been reading over have articulated more or less what I have been thinking about twitter lately.  I haven’t really used the service yet, but I’ve been ’shadow following’ (for lack of a better term) several marketing type people and other friends in my area to try to better understand why it has the err…umm…following, that it has so far.  Because to me, on first impression at least, the thing seems redundant to your average internet joe.  In earlier entries I covered how some companies are using it to manage their online brand identities and to keep the conversation going with their customers – and of course, the same could be said of its purpose for your average internet denizen – after all, we are all supposed to have a personal brand that stands for who we are and what we do.  And I get that.  But I’m just struggling with why anyone would really want to know what I am doing all the time.  I mean, I’m really not that interesting, and while it may be true that others are more interesting, I don’t want to know what they’re doing 24/7 either.  I’ve already acclimated to Facebook and my friends with constant status updates (which is pretty similar to twitter) and I regularly ignore those – I mean, how much time does one have in this world?  Yes, I get that it is fun to stay in contact with friends and to know what they are doing.  But all the time?  Really?  Is that really what is going to make the world a better place?  Constant conversation between everyone?  Are we headed toward the hive mind after all?

Sigh.

I’m not done with twitter (I’ve barely even started using it).  I’m waiting to see if I can get into it on a personal level and make the thing work for me in some sort of powerful way, as David Pogue witnessed toward the end of his article in the New York Times. See, I get that it could be that good.  I get that it might be nice to have an army of followers who can help at your every beck and call.  Maybe I’m just used to physically writing things down (you know, pen and paper) when I’m curious about something and I want to explore it later.  Maybe I don’t need to blast out some request and have it answered immediately.  Maybe I’m already set in my ways (that would be kind of sad considering I’m not even 30 yet).  I like email, I like RSS and using google reader for my blog reading in the mornings over a cup of coffee, I like the google (anyone notice the launching of that service for the computer illiterate?  Seems funny, or offensive, or both, to do it that way, but hey, I’m laughing).  I can’t remember where now, I think maybe it was in Wired, but there was an article saying the blog is dead.  Well I say fuck that.  The blog is not dead.  The blog is here, and writing is here, and that is going to stay.  RSS definitely made following blogs a lot easier, and I absolutely love it, but I just can’t say that I will ever need someone to tweet to me that they have updated their blog so I can go and read it immediately – the world is full of plenty enough interruptions as it is, and very few things are so important that I would want my phone distracting me constantly.  Oh man, all this complaining is making me feel so old.

For similar thoughts, better written (and funny), go here.

Ideas, ways to correct me and make me understand, go in the comments.

Twitter tries to monetize

Read about this here.  Basically, twitter will begin charging companies that use its service to track what is said (or tweeted) by customers about their respective businesses, and thereby monitor and (hopefully) improve their online image.

Based on the Social Media/Brand Evangelism project my team and I worked on during the MBA, twitter was a weapon of choice for these companies and I see no problem in having them pony up for what is clearly a very valuable service to most.  It seems like it would be a challenge to price the service effectively, given that you have lots of giant companies using it and then a much larger number of SMB that can probably only afford much less.  And then you have number of user restrictions, the challenge of differentiating users and businesses, etc.  And no one really likes to pay for something they have been getting for free all along.  According to the article, Dell sounds somewhat wary of the new fees, no matter how they materialize.