I have seen and reviewed about 30 of the 120 or so videos at TED. Each one is around 18-20 minutes and mostly the presenters are subject matter experts with a grand passion. Typically you would pay big $ to see most of the presenters at a specialised conference.

Highlights for me are the 2 Hans Rosling videos / and the Development ones on the Africa and Green Futures theme/s but really they are all good.

OK – maybe there is one which I think is completely out of place – Tony Robbins. There is no doubt Robbins is a clever presenter but it is a perhaps a measure of the very high quality of the other talks that he rates very low in the overall mix. Personally I don’t think much of his subject matter but readers puzzling over why he has an audience might like that one. Having the 18min version definitely beats paying for one of his slick and expensive conferences – but enough said on that point.

Majora Carter on local environment / community and Eva Vertes on medicine (she was 19 when she presented) are both outstanding high impact presentations.

Sir Ken Robinson on creativity in education which I have written extensively about. It is probably the best known one and exceptional.

The TED insights have been so useful that I have created a special TED category on my blog – see the website link which should take you to that category.

Especially these three posts which have been very well received.
3 – Creative Visualisation of numbers
2 – Creativity & Innovation Linked
1 – Spaghetti Sauce & other chunky content

Spaghetti sauce refers to a famous and wonderful presentation by Malcolm (Tipping Point) Gladwell on marketing excellence.

Another amazing thing about TED is that the videos have all been released on Creative Commons license and so anyone is free to use the content and in fact encouraged to do so.

See http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/21 which outlines the conditions and mission of the TED site.

So far I have compiled 2GB worth of videos on CD/DVD’s to make it easy for those with data caps / download logistics.

I have also enjoyed reading Noric’s insights on some of the same TED content at the very fine dilanchian.com.au site.

*waves* saw you on Facebook and thought I’d bop on in, see how you were doing, *waves again*