Have you met TED?

Have you already had the excellent adventure of watching any TED Talks? TED is an acronym for a nonprofit group that started in 1984 with a conference on Technology, Entertainment, and Design. They have a very large collection of talks posted as videos both on their web site and on YouTube.

Here are two of my favorites - Susan Cain on The power of Introverts, and Phil Plait on How to defend earth from asteroids.




Three other TED Talks that I’ve enjoyed recently were Drew Curtis: How I Beat a Patent Troll, Reuben Heyday Margolin: Scultpting waves in wood and time, and Rob Reid: The 8 billion dollar iPod.

If you’d like to see some great five-minute talks, look up Ignite on YouTube. Also look up TedX and you can find ones like Joe Smith on How to Use One Paper Towel (which I found yesterday via a blog post by Marco Montemagno). There also are some longer talks done at Google, like another by Susan Cain.

Have you met Ted? is a line said by Barney Stinson (played by Neil Parick Harris) on the TV comedy show How I Met Your Mother. Barney used it for introducing his friend Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) to women at bars.