2000 TEDx’s and other TED happenings

There have been a few inter­est­ing hap­pen­ings in the world of TED and TEDx in recent times. First, today 22 June 2011, sees the 2000^th TEDx event. That’s quite the mile­stone in rather less than three years. Our con­grat­u­la­tions go out to all the TEDx organ­is­ers around the world; those that are already our friends, and those we haven’t yet met. More, our thanks go to Lara Stein and the TEDx Team at the TED moth­er­ship in New York. With­out their tire­less work, there would be no TEDx. You can see Lara talk about TEDx at TEDxUSC in the video below.

The TEDx com­mu­nity of organ­is­ers is very strong, catch­ing up often and wher­ever we can. Just a few weeks ago, Steve man­aged to catch up with sev­eral TEDx organ­is­ers at TEDxSyd­ney, includ­ing David Ward from TEDx­Dubbo and Rajasekar Non­bu­raj from TEDx­Chen­nai as well as TEDx­Ade­laide licensee and TEDx­Can­berra pre­sen­ter, Kristin Alford, pre­sen­ter Ash Don­ald­son and TEDAc­tive host, Rives who had obvi­ously fallen into a set of clip­pers by acci­dent and now shares a match­ing hair­cut with Steve! Next, in more TEDx news, more than 7000 TEDx videos from events around the world are now avail­able directly from the TED site. They’re pro­gres­sively tagged with the same set of key­words the main TED Talks site uses. It’s an amaz­ing resource! You can search by tags, speaker, lan­guage and a num­ber of other facets and by indi­vid­ual events, includ­ing, nat­u­rally, ours. Last, in a fan­tas­tic effort, Pos­tRank have pulled data about the grow­ing library of TED Talks and parsed it through some clever code to deter­mine which talk ranks as the most engag­ing. They’ve taken all the talks and clus­tered them by sub­ject and by social net­work they’ve been dis­cussed on to break their analy­sis down. It’s an amaz­ing piece of work, and all in just 40 lines of Ruby.