It seems that the Internet is helping more and more to find the equilibrium point between the needs of “big media” and “independent media”. In this post I would like to mention two sources of useful / interesting videos:
The first would be the videos from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference (credit goes to Kees Leune for bringing it to my attention). From Wikipedia:
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference that defines its mission as "ideas worth spreading". The lectures, also called TED Talks, cover a broad set of topics including science, arts and design, politics, education, culture, business, global issues, technology and development, and entertainment. Speakers have included such people as former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Nobel laureates James D. Watson, Murray Gell-Mann, and Al Gore, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Billy Graham.
The videos of the talk can be found on their website (which, somewhat surprisingly, uses PHP :-)). The good: the talks are short (between 5 and 30 minutes) and the speakers are very enthusiastic. Also, the videos are clearly licensed under a well-known license (the CC by-nc-nd 3.0 license) and you can embed them on your websites (for example below I’ve embedded a very interesting talk about the psychology of cheating). The player is also quite advanced (for example it can do seeking without waiting for the entire movie to load). The bad: they don’t have a playlist feature, so it is a little harder for you to mark the videos which you would like to watch. You can however open them in a background tab, because the player doesn’t load until you actually look at the page. An other word of warning: the volume control resets itself between views. Also, some of the talks are a little “out there”, but – as always – use your judgment.
An other source for science / tech news are the Google Tech Talks. Again, a lot of material (with some of them in HD quality) and you can find a lot of interesting content:
The conclusion: there are a lot of good videos out there which you can watch entirely legally and which should make “big media” realize that how inflated their pricing scheme is.
One response to “Interesting videos”
it’s even more than you’ll expect at first sight, the TED conferences cover the hottest topics and gathers the leading people in every domain. also, as opposed to google talks which, beside being with the people who get the most votes (so many employees have to know the speaker or be interested in the subject), are also kind of boring and take an hour of your life, TED is both entertaining and informative (check http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html for example. which later, with some help from google, becamed a free web application at http://tools.google.com/gapminder). actually you can almost use TED to be “up to date” with the scienctific developments (hypothetical scenario: Ariely creates a hype with “predictably irrational” in late 2008 in a domain you’re not following closely. in april 2009 you’ll have it on TED. oh, wait, it’s not hypothetical)