Ted.com is the website of the long-running Technology, Entertainment & Design conference which since 1984 has brought together many of the world’s leading thinkers and intellectuals, and challenged them to give the talk of their lives in just under 20 minutes…
For many years the conference was an invite only affair, and even then tickets cost around $6,000, meaning that the general public had very little benefit from this remarkable series of talks and presentations.
However in 2006 the website started featuring videos of some of the mini-lectures delivered at TED each year, and has continued to add both new and archive videos since then. The site now resembles a much smaller, Youtube-style, content database, containing nearly 300 20-minute videos of some of the world’s leading thinkers from the fields of technology, entertainment and design giving their presentations.
Fancy hearing what Kevin Kelly has to say on the next 5,000 days of the web? Or maybe hear Billy Graham on technology, faith and suffering? Al Gore, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are all up there too, as is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales amongst many others. The topics vary greatly, but the talks are consistently inspiring, funny and informative, and one could do a lot worse than spend a few hours browsing them.
Yet another wonderful example of the internet’s potential for enabling democratic and free access to previously unavailable knowledge, ideas and thinking - well done TED, I for one will be a regular user from now on…
Dejan Levi