What’s the Big Deal With TED? Watch for Free Tonight
The TED conference has been surrounded by some pretty heavy mystique since its inception almost 20 years ago.
This year’s conference seems to be changing that. In addition to the main conference in Monterey, Calif., 300 people are in Colorado, attending a simultaneous gathering at TED@Aspen.
TED organizers announced they’ll be live streaming the TED Prize ceremony today at 5:15 p.m Pacific Time.
The TED Prize is awarded to those whose work extends beyond their area of specialty to educate, inform and enlighten people around the world.
This year’s winners are Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun who has become an authority on comparative religion; Dave Eggers, author, philanthropist and founder of the 826 writing labs for kids; and Neil Turok, a cosmologist and education activist.
In addition to the $100,000 prize, the recipients are granted a wish that’s fulfilled through donated goods, services and connections.
What does this have to do with news? Aside from the conference being something of news itself, it may spark broader thinking about the nature of news, and what is possible online. Each one of the recipients started in a single calling and through curiosity and application expanded and shared their body of knowledge.
Learn more about this year’s TED Prize recipients and read up on live blogs from the conference before watching the ceremony.
Keeping Up With We Media
Down in Miami, people are recovering from a massive power outage.
Now that the power’s back to most of the city, I expect We Media Miami will be kicking off.
In addition to scanning Twitter and following Web posts by other attendees, conference organizer iFocos has an embeddable widget that carries the latest from the official blog.
Not a bad way to spread the word.
Web Producers: We’re Mad as Hell, and We’re Not Going to Take This Anymore
You may have spent several minutes (or hours) of your day sifting through the rants on AngryJournalist.
One of the main problems I see is it’s a lot of venting and no resolution.
Businesspeople will tell you complaining will only get you fired. Raise a complaint and propose a solution, though, and the people in charge — if they’re smart — might just listen.
Cory Bergman at the TV-oriented site Lost Remote has started a thread for ticked-off Web producers who want to fix what’s wrong with online news.
Check it out and join the conversation.
Watch Journalists and Other Web Geeks in Action
As mentioned earlier this week, the live webcast from “Journalism 3G: The Future of Technology in the Field” (a symposium on computation + journalism) begins at 1 p.m. ET.
Speakers and panelists include:
- Krishna Bharat – Principal Scientist at Google and creator of Google News
- Ian Bogost – videogame designer, critic, and researcher, Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games
- David Cohn – Beatblogging.org and NewAssignment.net
Ezra Cooperstein – Director of Development and Production for the Viewer-Created Content group at Current TV - Leah Culver – Founder of Pownce, a San Francisco-based micro-blogging service
- John Geraci – Co-Creator of outside.in
- Mark Hansen – Co-PI of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA, creator of sensorbase.org (and one of the guys who created the cool art installation in the NYTimes Tower)
- Alexander Hauptman – Senior Systems Scientist working on the Informedia: News-on-Demand project at Carnegie Mellon University
- Elizabeth Spiers – media columnist for Fast Company magazine, founding editor of Gawker.com
Check out the full list of speakers, then be sure to watch the webcast. QuickTime 7 or later required.
News Flash: In Blogging, Timing Matters
Those who blog conscientiously know this already, but it’s worth bringing up this excellent post from Mindy McAdams.
Today, OC Register science columnist Gary Robbins spoke at a panel about blogging during the Future of Science Journalism Symposium.
In addition to writing about things his local audience can actually see and experience for themselves, Robbins times his Sciencedude posts to have the most impact:
The idea that “people will find it†is a vestige of the old journalism, Robbins said — no, they won’t find it, unless you play it correctly.
Therefore, it pays to know your metrics. Any site that doesn’t let its producers see Web traffic is wasting opportunities to tailor its content for maximum traffic, which translates, of course, into money. Think about that.
