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The Most Popular Ted Talks of 2011

January 1, 2012 in Videos

2011 was a busy year, so I wasn’t able to keep up to speed with all of the Ted Talks as they were released. Today I decided to look back at the most watched TED Talks uploaded in 2011, as a quick way to catch up on the best. Although I know the most popular doesn’t always mean the best quality, it felt like a good enough proxy for me!

Here’s the list I found, if you’d like to catch up on some great talks too:

10. Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world (230k)

9. Ron Gutman: The hidden power of smiling (243k)

8. Terry Moore: How to tie your shoes (284k)

7. Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education (293k)

6. Sebastian Thrun: Google’s driverless car (297k)

5. Alexander Tsiaras: Conception to birth — visualized (334k)

4.Marco Tempest: The magic of truth and lies (and iPods)

3. Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles” (508k)

2. Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter … (557k)

She recently released this poem as a hardback book too.

1. A robot that flies like a bird (1.5m)

IBM’s ‘Mad Science’ Series

February 1, 2010 in Videos

The IBM Social Media channel on YouTube has been posted several videos to promote aSmarterPlanet.com, all with the common theme of using data, computing and analytics to make our world run smarter. It’s nerd-tastic!

Once you look past the unnecessary (and unfunny) humour that they include in these videos, this really is a nice little series. They’re well made and very educational videos.

Here are the videos they’ve uploaded so far, I’d definitely recommend checking them out:

Economics and Ecology

January 12, 2010 in Economics, Essays, Videos

I’m a big fan of the VlogBrothers, two brothers who make daily youtube videos addressed to each other (but also to a wider audience). In today’s video one of the brothers, Hank, attempts to give the other brother – and the rest of the viewers – a quick overview of “Ecosystem Services“. To quote Hank directly:

“Ecology is a fascinating and complicated science. But if you mix it with the fascinating and complicated science of economics, you end up giving value to the things our world does for us.

Those things, in ecological lingo, are “ecosystem services” and you can actually put price tags on them.”

It’s an interesting video and a great introduction to an area of economics that I had never really considered before:

5 Great Uses of YouTube Annotations

October 21, 2009 in Videos

Youtube annotations allow video creators to add clickable links to certain parts of their videos. This was originally designed to create simple transitions from one video to another, but as with all technologies the best results have come from putting it to previously unimagined uses.

Here are four of the best examples of how it’s done, and one cautionary tale.

Where’s dexter?

To promote the new season of the TV Show Dexter, the US network Showtime created a mini-game called ‘Where’s Dexter’ – a video version of ‘Where’s Wally’. The game has several levels, with the prize being a viewing of the trailer for the season.

Truth or Fail

Hank Greene (of vlogbrothers) used Youtube annotations to create an interactive video quiz show called Truth or Fail.

Youtube Fighter

Interactive Parkour

Kaká

And just to balance things out, here’s a video I consider to be a bad use of video annotations. Links that let you control the camera angles of the video. There’s nothing wrong with it in principle, it just seems as if they made use of the technology simply because they could, not because it would lead to great content.

Signs

March 16, 2009 in Marketing, Videos

I found this video today (via MJ). It’s one of the nicest short films I’ve seen in a long time, and is well worth the 12mins of your time. (click if you can’t view the video below).

One of my first thoughts for the video was “this should be an ad for Twitter”. Is it wrong that my first thought about such a lovely short film was business related? Probably. But I still think it was an important one.

In the marketing world, as the transition is being made from TV ads to online videos, the trend has been to make snappier, shorter, “more viral” videos. While this has worked well in many instances, I don’t think it’s the only way that online video can be best used.

If you have a product as good as Twitter, something that is unique and enriches peoples lives, then I see no reason why you couldn’t use an artistic short film similar to the one above to convey the value your service can bring to people.

There’s a lot of talented filmmakers and film school students out there thirsty for projects to work on (and for budgets!) and it would probably work out much cheaper than a TV campaign. It’s just a thought.

Obama names Tom Daschle as his Secretary of Health and Human Services

November 20, 2008 in links, Videos

It was announced earlier today that former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle will be Health and Human Services secretary in Obama’s cabinet. The news is pretty widespread on the internet, and all of the big news sites have write ups on the story, so I won’t try echo here what they’ve already said.

However, if you are interested in the people that the American’s new President-elect is selecting for his cabinet (as I am) you should have a look at some/all of the interviews below which are good introductions to Tom Daschle. Charlie Rose interviews are always quite good, each one is about 20 mins.

December 2, 2003

May 14, 2002

July 25, 1996

November 29, 1994

Leave a comment and let me know what you think of Mr. Daschle.

Musical Tesla Coil

October 23, 2008 in Videos

Absolutely brilliant! The music it plays shows they know their audience…. i.e Geeks like me!

I found this video here, check it out, there’s some more pretty cool science related videos.