TED is open: free views of TED Talks, and free talks of Ted users
TED has started its social networking project by not only letting people take part in TED events free of charge (free downloads of 20-minute thought-provoking talks), but also encouraging viewers, occasional site visitors to sign up for its TED social networking services. There were 44 talks in January 2007 viewed more than 3 million times, and by the middle of April 2007 there were more than a hundred talks to choose from, including one of my all time favourites with its exquisite narration and minimal - maximal presentation skills by Malcolm Gladwell from New Yorker (coming soon in another post on LineMarketing) on What We Can Learn from Spaghetti Sauce?.
Here is my profile for annplugged.
What I best like about the profile page is exactly what appears on the first page of your profile in the members profile list: What are you passionate about?
You can subscribe to TEDTalks for automatic updates, choose your favourite speakers, talks, themes, members, and you can see all of the user’s comments. So basically, the site is not overloaded with social features, which at this point is ideal.
What I miss is the What my friends/ other users suggest viewing and why option, yes, á lá Amazon.com (by the way, these recommendation snippets would be not only informative, but extremely useful for a good online visibility on search sites, and really beneficial for video content from a searchability point of view).
The TED Blog is not as active yet as the number of video views would suggest, but there have been some interesting blog posts since the beginning of March (by Bruno Giussani - guest blogger LunchOver IP, Diego Rodriguez - guest blogger metacool, June Cohen - Director TED Media, and Tom Rielly - TED Humorist). I hope the blog will be getting more buzz, and participate in the blogosphere community with more relish, too.