TED

Each day I receive about 100 articles to read through my heavy use of the Google Alerts feature of my gmail account, which allows me to capture any electronically published material (news papers, news wires, blogs, scientific journals, magazines, etc) on topics that relate to the key words that I have set up and am constantly tweaking. This allows me stay on top of the areas of science, politics, literature, culture, etc. that I am interested in. I open all of the articles in Firefox tabs, read some of them immediately (the ones with catchy headlines), then tag those and the others to my del.icio.us account (the unread ones tagged for later reading). Recently I got an article that was linked to the TED site and for some reason (probably too much time on my hands) I decided to see what this was all about. I'm really glad that I did.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out in 1984 (long before the internet) 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 - a tall order, as you can probably imagine.

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from TED's archives are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. Here's the link:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/list

I have watched quite a few and found them all to be pretty amazing. You owe it to yourself to check this out - at least take a couple of minutes to scroll through the list of speakers that have talks in the archive. You may not recognize all of the names but then again, how may astrophysicists, molecular biologists, anthropologists, etc. ever get to be household names? Anyway, it is all free of course and TED's mission is worthy of supporting - it is after all what the architects of the internet had in mind in the beginning: the free sharing of ideas and information for the betterment of humanity. Sounds pretty good to me.