What are TED talks?

It surprises me that there are still many people who are not aware of what TED talks are. Basically, it's a venue where innovators, experts, and other people share exceptional ideas. These talks are then shared online through their website or on YouTube.

It's really amazing how social media is able to disseminate information to almost everyone in the world. I say almost because there are some countries where the internet is regulated and many forms of social media are banned.


This is me pretending to give a talk during the TEDxManila, an independently organized TED talk here in the Philippines
Here's the first ever TED talk video that I watched a few years ago. Actually, the reason I am writing about TED talks is because a recent blog post I shared here, the one about Adobe Audition's Spectral Display, reminded me of this video. It's a video of Evelyn Glennie, a deaf percussionist, talking about perception of music and showing off some of her skills:

The next video I chose to show here would be on the topic of music again. It's actually very similar to an article I wrote about how to use Ableton Live as a Sampling and Looping Software. It's the TED talk of Andrew Bird, a brilliant musician, and one-man orchestra:


And of course the talks aren't limited to music, there are also others like science and technology, dance, art, politics, physics, psychology, economics, art and many other things. I've actually found TED talks useful in promoting individual liberty in my other blogs like the one when I wrote about Paul Romer and his Charter Cities idea or when I wrote about David Cameron and the Post-bureaucratic Age.


One of the organizers of the TEDxManila was actually Joel Yuvienco, a former professor of mine in a computer science class. It's interesting that it was actually a class about blogging (relevance of tags, RSS feeds, etc.) and now I'm blogging about him. He's the one on the very left. The one beside him is Graham Glass an innovator of education and one of the speakers that day. He actually tackled some concepts about education that somehow resonated with my concerns that I blogged about in a previous entry about math teachers, multimedia, and classroom innovation (and that blog post has a TED talk video as well! Shows how ultimately influenced I am by this amazing source of information).

In the middle of the photo is Uli Oposa with his girlfriend Mirra Reyes. He is the son of Ramon Magsaysay awardee Antonio Oposa who was also a speaker that day. He's actually the reason we were able to get in the talks. I tried applying online but I guess I wasn't good enough haha. Also with me, of course is the lovely Adrienne Nicole Bernal. What a fun and informative day that was. I'm really looking forward to getting to watch the next TEDxManila or possibly even one day attend TED talks in other countries as well.

So if you're bored or have nothing else to do anyways, there is a free source of information and you can learn so much just by going to http://www.ted.com or subscribe to their YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector