TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It’s an annual conference that’s been running since 1984 and challenges the world’s best thinkers to give a presentation in just 18 minutes. The topics vary wildly and the scope is a lot bigger than the original acronym implies.
Attending the conferences is expensive and through an approved application only, however the non-profit organisation behind it has started making videos of the talks available online. They become pretty addictive once you start watching.
Some of my favourites so far include Richard Dawkins on militant atheism, Stefan Sagmeister on happy design, Jonathan Harris on the secrets of the web, Jeff Hawkins on brain science and computing, David Kelley on human centred design, and Rives on 4 o’clock in the morning.
UDPATE: Robert Wright on how modern morals might evolve from capitalism is really excellent too.
Please feel free to comment with your own recommendations.
They’re great aren’t they? This is the best I’ve seen so far. . .
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
They’re great except for the intro.
The music is like those Dolby Digital demonstrations at the start of a movie in a cinema (which incidentally always strikes me as being as pointless as showing a white flashing strobe for 30 seconds and then saying “we do ALL the colours at ALL the Hertz”), but it’s a little intense when you’re trying to watch something on a little laptop in bed. There’s another blast of sound at the end too, which wakes me up if I’ve been using them to fall asleep too. But it doesn’t really detract from them, it just makes me associate BMW with being annoying.
Totally off topic, but my favourite toy as a kid was a bear called Big Ted.
Aww… if only you’d said “Big TED” – it would have been on topic and carried the conversation along nicely ;)
Great blog you have here. That TED site is amazing!