We couldn’t have done it, of course, without the amazing support from all our partners. We hope they get involved again next year.

We’ll have the video available as soon as we can. It’s already in post-production. In the meantime, there are already a bunch of photos available from our Music and Pictures guy, Gavin Tapp and the rest of the official photos will be available soon.

We’ve also sent out the audience feedback survey to you all. Please fill it in, as it’ll help us make TEDxCanberra 2012 better than ever. And, if you want to give us more detail about how you felt the day went, please comment here or write your feelings down at your own places online and let us know about them. We promise to link to them.

There are already a few pieces out there:

• Jen Frahm’s 28 TEDxCanberra take-aways
• presenter, Matt Noffs’ odd experience just before presenting
• volunteer, Gavin Tapp’s thoughts on being part of the team again in 2011
• 666 ABC Canberra’s thoughts from Melanie Tait and Jim Trail
• presenter, Nick Ritar, interviewed on 666 ABC Canberra
• The Canberra Times’ coverage, with perhaps the oddest headline ever (never trust a sub-editor, apparently)
• Craig Thomler’s live blog, which also captures a significant part of the #tedxcanberra tweet stream
• Emma Magenta discusses TEDxCanberra the day before the show on 666 ABC Canberra
• Andrey Sidorov’s photos on Google+, including some pretty fancy capoeira footwork from Simon Le and Emma Magenta
• volunteer, Tom Worthington’s thoughts the day before
• a few words from our friend, Jason Schoolmeester, licensee of TEDxDarwin
• CJ Mules lets us know it’s “for science”

For now, we have some tidy-up work to do to finish off with 2011, then we take a bit of a rest before heading into organising TEDxCanberra 2012. If at any time, you think you have an idea for a presenter we might like to look at, or you want to offer a pair of hands for the volunteer crew, please do!

Thanks for being a part of the TEDxCanberra family!

Creating TEDxCanberra is something I’m particularly proud of, mostly because of the fantastic group of people I get to work with and the friends I’ve been able to make.

I’ve watched TED Talks online since they first appeared five years ago (this week is the anniversary, actually). I’d watch a handful each week, using them as a way to inspire and shift the way I think.

What’s your favorite TEDTalk ever?

One of the very first TEDTalks I saw online was Ben Dunlap’s A Passionate Life. It’s remained, unquestionably, my favorite TEDTalk ever since. As best I can, I continue to try to live the sort of life Ben describes.

And what TEDTalk has come out since TEDxCanberra 2010 that excites you?

Since last year’s TEDxCanberra, I’ve seen talks that made me smile and laugh, that irritated me and that made me angry. But only one talk made me cry. And every time I watch it, I have the same reaction; thankfully they’re tears of empathy.

I was at TEDActive in Palm Springs when musician and composer, Eric Whitacre, spoke about a 2000-strong virtual choir. The joy on his face, and of those participating through their YouTube video contributions is incredibly special. Beyond that, this, more than anything, proves the naysayers with respect to the human value of social networks are utterly, completely and irretrievably wrong.

Beyond that, I have no musical talent whatsoever; to see all these talented people come together for something special is to see where the talent I missed got handed out.

It’s worth visiting the Virtual Choir site to see the fininshed result. I guarantee you’ll be moved.

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.

One of the world’s great astrophysicists, Carl Sagan, certainly had a way with words. His Pale Blue Dot is one of the great texts discussing the future of humanity in the cosmos.

Sagan’s book, his words and the film embedded below, let alone the famous photograph the book is named after, certainly puts humanity’s place in the universe into perspective. Taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from over 6 billion kilometers away, it completely makes one realise that as a species, our place is tiny in an infinite universe.

Several years ago, filmmaker Michael Marantz, made a short film with the same title, using Sagan’s words and his own imagery. We’d like to share it with you.

EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

@trib

Let’s be absolutely clear, my preference for which TEDTalks are my favorites changes often. Some of my all-time favorites are already on this site, and there are a couple of others, like Valerie Plame Wilson’s commanding call out on nuclear disarmament from TED2010 and Jamie Cullum’s amazing and emotional performance of John Lennon’s Imagine from TED2009 that aren’t yet public.

So, like Gavin suggested in his earlier post, here are my current three.

Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish

Chef, Dan Barber’s passion about food lies not only in the cooking and eating of it, but also its provenance and the environment that food is sourced from. This tale, from TED2009, tells of a former wasteland returned to glorious productivity through clever farming methods.

Al Gore on averting climate crisis

One of the very first TEDTalks on the TED site, this early example of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth talk is no less powerful years on than it ever was.

Lewis Pugh swims the North Pole

Lewis has spoken at TED a couple of times now. His amazing capacity for swimming in extreme environments as a way to draw attention to the issue of anthropogenic climate change is compelling. His compassion for our planet, combined with the extreme aggression he needs to summon to complete his swims makes him an extraordinary human being.

I hope you enjoy these TEDTalks as much as I do!

It’s long, at 40-odd minutes, but it is an interesting look inside what goes on. And there’s an interesting chat with TEDx manager, Lara Stein, at about 3:47.

Enjoy!

Enjoy.

It’s for this reason that we are absolutely delighted to announce that Professor Pat McGorry, the 2010 Australian of the Year, will be a speaker at TEDxCanberra 2010 on 23 October.

Professor McGorry has a long history of leadership on the issues and facts surrounding those suffering from mental illness and acting as a strong advocate for them in matters of policy reform.

He has been especially outspoken since being named as Australian of the Year, including several media pieces detailing his views with respect to government inaction on mental health reform and taking part in the GetUp! campaign, Health Matters.

At TEDxCanberra, we’re really looking forward to Pat taking the stage and bringing the issues of mental health reform to the forefront of our audience’s attention.