What Makes TED a Website Worth Visiting?

By Ngan Nguyen

What is TED?

Launched for the first time in 1984 by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marques, TED events have quickly attracted the attention of those who desire to learn and share. Ted talks were at first available in 3 fields: Technology, Entertainment and Design (hence: TED). Currently, TED talks cover many areas, including Science, Business, and Art... and have gained worldwide attention. In addition to the official annual conference, fans can find local TED talks through TEDx groups which operate completely independently from TED.

On TED.com, you can watch over 900 TED Talks. The themes are constantly updated. The best thing is that most of these videos are in English and subtitled in foreign languages (42 languages).

The guests can be very famous, including former US President Bill Clinton, or the co-founder of Wikipedia, who received the Nobel Peace Prize... but sometimes you will not regcognize the speaker’s name, simply because their field of expertise is not widely known.

Currently, TED events are available throughout the US, Europe and Asia. On 13/11/2012, TED Talks reached 1 billion views around the world.

So what makes TED a website worth visiting?

First, the topics are varied, innovative and inspiring. For example: "Schools Kill Creativity" (Sir Ken Robinson), "How to Live Before You Die" (Steve Jobs), "How Great Leaders Inspire Action" (Simon Sinek), "How to Buy Happiness" (Michael Norton)... In addition, there are many talks about how to organize your life: "Less Stuff, More Happiness" (Graham Hill), "Time-Saving Top 10 Tech Tips" (David Pogue). TED talks are meant to be different (they teach us how to think differently, think outside the box) and should really be useful to the listener.

Second, TED talks teach us how to communicate in a concise, compelling and convincing way. The maximum time for a speech is just 18 minutes, Speakers are asked to present their ideas in a creative way and to be as appealing as possible. The most common method is the narrative (storytelling). If you watch a lot of talks on TED, you can see how the presenters use many different facial expressions, can stand in place while talking, use slides, drawings or models. During a talk entitled "My Immigration Story" Tan Le - a Vietnamese-Australian lawyer - led the audience to tears simply by standing in place and telling the story of her family fleeing Vietnam.

Third, TED is easy to use. When you log into the homepage on TED.com, you can easily search for talks by topic (technology, entertainment, design, business, science, global issues) or simply look for new talks (newest released), most viewed (most viewed). There are many not typical search options such as convincing (persuasive), courage (courageous), inspirational (inspiring)... Thanks to partners from all around the world, each TED video has subtitles in multiple languages (including Vietnamese), thanks to which the language barrier does not hinder the spread of ideas.

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