First of all, I must lay down TED is a
global set of conferences that would like to bring together the 3 fields:
technology, entertainment and design. One of my favourite websites’ aim is to
make the audience acquainted with big ideas. Operators and participants of the
site passionately believe in the power of ideas that can influence – moreover,
even change (!) – our world. That is why conferences were born and took it upon
itself to disseminate clever, entertaining ideas word wide.
Some facts:
- Originally, it was founded as a one-off event in 1984.
- The conference was held annually from 1990.
- Since 2006, talks have been available online through the websites: TED.com, YouTube, iTunes. As for the next step, events have been offering live streaming of talks since 2009.
- Nowadays over 1,050 talks can be found on the site for free. According to data, videos had been viewed 50 million times by January 2009. And what is more, the viewing figure stood at more than 500 million in June 2011, which reflects a seriously growing global audience. à It clearly shows us the webpage managed to hit the target and it proved to be an effective way of online communication.
- TED staff is headquartered in
- Talks address an increasingly wide range of topics, thinkers are challenged to present their ideas in the most innovative and fascinating ways in 18 minutes or less. Every single talk is subtitled in English and translated into a number of languages – over 300 translations were done by volunteers.
- TED Prize was initiated in 2005. There is a performer every year who is given the opportunity to make a “wish to change the world” and $100,000 for starting his revolution.
On the site you can choose from hundreds of videos by topic, speaker,
length, etc. I prefer the ones under the ‘funny’ label; still, this time I
would like to show you something else. If you have 19 mins, watch this talk on
flow by the Hungarian psychology professor Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Enjoy!
