Three Great Presentations from TED

TED is apparently a great show, packed with new ideas presented often brilliantly. In part this posting is one of my first experiments with posting streaming video, but the three presentations are all very relevant to the theme of this blog.

Larry Lessig says the law is strangling creativity

Lawrence Lessig provides a great talk recommending a revolution that changes copyright protection of digital content to allow remixing. He suggests that this could reverse the 20th century trend to turn most people into "read only" consumers of content, allowing most people to be "read and write" producers of content. Kids are already using the technology in this way, and we either change the law or have a generation of the most creative people deciding that it is ok to break the law on a regular basis. The talk was given in March 2007, and posted on the TED website in November 2007.

Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world

The creator of the Trendalyzer software and website returns to TED with another great presentation on development and poverty. It was filmed in March and posted in June, 2007.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo

This Microsoft architect presents a great suite of software that creates hyperlinks among images by finding the same images in different frames. Doing so, the software offers not only the possibility of new surfing modalities especially interesting to the visually oriented, but also a way to associate websites with images with other websites with related images, thus expanding the linkages that are the World Wide Web. Filmed in March and posted in May 2007.