The TrueTalk Blog

TED Presentation: Video Blogging on YouTube - Part 2

I presented a TED University session on "Video Blogging on YouTube: Why, What and How." It was fun and well-received. Many participants asked for copies of the presentation so I decided make a video which included me narrating the slides. 

Here's Part 2. You can find Part 1, here.

TED Presentation: Video Blogging on YouTube - Part 1

I presented a TED University session on "Video Blogging on YouTube: Why, What and How." It was fun and well-received. Many participants asked for copies of the presentation so I decided make a video which included me narrating the slides. 

Here's Part 1.

Post TED Thoughts

I'm still on the road (in lovely Colorado Springs right now) after the TED wrap-up on Saturday. Things keep reverberating in my head.

Steven Pinker's talk has made the greatest impression on me over the last few days. He articulated something I'd known but had never said so clearly: "we live in the least violent era in human history." By any metric (fatalities caused by war, institutional torture, domestic violence, child abuse, slavery) global civilization has never been as peaceful.

And yet we agonize over what feel like the all-too-frequent remaining instances of these crimes against humanity. We have developed a "zero-tolerance"  mindset against atrocity.

Which may very well be the most powerful step in (purely cultural?) evolution since the appearance of our species.

Pinker's explanation for these changes (civilization=deterrence; the increased economic value of life [life's no longer "cheap"]; the reciprocal benefits of cooperation; the enlarging circle of empathy which we feel for our distant fellows today) are all valid. Alfred Adler posited a deep current in the human spirit. In German he called it, gemeinschaftsgefuhl. "Fellow feeling," is a tepid translation.

Ah, now I see that  Wiktionary translates it as: "a profound sense of caring [for] others and a desire to improve the world." Yes, that's more like it.

A profound sense of connection with others and a desire to improve our lot, environmentally, economically, physically, socially, spiritually.

As we become increasingly visible to one another through media and, now, the direct connections of social media, that sense of fellow feeling grows. It's difficult to shut out the "distant" atrocities (Darfur? where's that?) after seeing images of Auschwitz, the Killing Fields or Rwanda. Like Martha said, we got nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.

This doesn't mean we necessarily ACT as quickly and/or resolutely as we might. But , as Pinker showed, we're getting better, much better.

Pinker closed his talk with two interlocking questions: "Why is there peace? What have we been doing right?"

I think the answers have something to do with that profound feeling of connection with others that we have nurtured in our thoughts, our words ("we hold these truths to be self-evident..."), our families, our institutions and our governments — imperfect though they may be.

We are working at making ourselves more civilized. As Phillipe Stark said at TED, we are re-writing our collective poetry to enable a new story of our genetic mutant species.

TED 2007 - Day Two (Part 1)

Here's a vlog about the first part of yesterday's TED.

TED Vlog #1

Here's the first YouTube video I posted about TED2007.

More to come over the next few days.

TED2007 - Day One, Part Two

Hans Rosling kicked off the second session of Day One of TED07. Rosling was here last year and brought the house down with his informative presentation of historical health data trends. His imaginative data visualization tool, Gapminder, was augmented by his infectiousness. Seeing him on the program again this year I thought, "hmm..." Not to worry. Not only was he factually informative (partially attributable, he says, to the UN opening up their health information databases) but once again highly entertaining. We can no longer look at the world's nations in simplistic "developed/developing" terms. Here's a vintage Rosling line: "My neighbor knows 200 kind of wine and two kinds of countries; I know two kinds of wind (red and white!) and 200 kinds of countries." One more. In talking about historical statistics he said: "I believe stats when they are grandma-verified stats!" And then, the piece de resistance. Rosling takes off his shirt, revealing a superhero-like t-shirt (complete with gold lamé lightning bolt!) and declares that he is going to swallow an 18" long Swedish bayonet as a way of demonstrating that while most of us believe significant African development to be impossible (along the seven key dimensions of human rights, environment, governance, economic growth, education, health and culture), he will show that the seemingly impossible is, indeed, possible. The result?

Now, that's a guy who knows how to close!

How do you follow that? Well, it helps to have a Nobel Prize, which made it easier for the legendary quantum physicist, complexity theorist, etc., Murray Gell-Mann. It's hard to describe the thrill of  watching and listening to a brilliant man in his late 70s speak about profound things. Gell-Mann started by honoring the images of his predecessors which surrounded him on stage, particularly Newton and Einstein ("hi Al," he quipped!). Beauty, he said, is a remarkable criterion for determining the accuracy of theories in physics.  Why? Because the mathematical simplicity/elegance of those theories (a kind of operational definition of "beauty") has consistently proven to be a key indicator of their explanatory power. Gell-Mann spoke with such force (speaking about the emergence of complex structure from simple elements plus accidents, he said, "people say there must be more to it than that; they're WRONG!!"), wit and charm that I know I'm not alone in wishing he could have stayed on for hours. It was a  real honor to experience him here.

Unfortunately, the brilliant geneticist Jonathan Widom had the unenviable task of being next. At the party last evening I spoke with another brilliant genetic researcher who said he believed that if his research proves to be as productive as it appears, it is possible that Widom himself may be in line for a Nobel. Heady stuff. Unfortunately, his presentation was too complex for the layman and, despite Chris Anderson's efforts to bring out the key relevant messages for an audience like this, informative in only general terms. My takeaway: we are learning more about the particular circumstances in which genetic sequences instantiate and Widom is at the forefront of that learning.

Jeff Han's presentation is impossible to portray verbally. Watch this video of last year's talk and you'll understand what I mean. This year's developments? A much bigger screen and multi-user capability. This technology will change everything about the way we think of computers and their role in collaboration. After seeing Han's work, the Apple iPhone looks like something made by Fisher-Price.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar closed the session with a message, appropriately enough, about standing on the shoulders of giants. Kareem is such a legend that it's impossible to overstate his impact on basketball. But his story of growing up in Harlem in the 50s and 60s and being deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance is surely not as well known. He paid homage to many of the great jazz musicians of the era, including his police-officer father, and to his coach at Power Memorial Academy, Jack Donahue. Ultimately, success in any endeavor is a function of three factors: integrity (being yourself), learning the system (not simply doing your own thing), and execution (most importantly, having the gift of timing.) Most of us probably wish Kareem could have presented his talk extemporaneously instead of reading prepared remarks, but that would be quibbling. His message was a powerful one.

And that was it for Day One. On to Day Two and an amazing array of speakers.

One Beat TEDster Here!

Whew!

Day One of TED is finished. I'll try my best to wrap up concisely.

First of all, I had a reallllllly lousy trip out here, missing three flights (!), arriving in Monterey at 3:00 AM body time this morning, sans luggage.

Ah, travel in America.

But, I was scheduled to do a TED University session on "Video Blogging On YouTube" this morning and needed to be at the "professor" orientation at 9:00, so I needed  to sleep fast.

The presentation went off went pretty well (12 minutes is a really short period of time to talk about something you're passionate about). We were each scheduled to present two sessions and about 2 minutes into my second one YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen walked it and sat down. It was fun watching them listen to my take on their site and we had a good chat about things afterwards.

Then the real TED began.

Project Cassini researcher Carolyn Porco kicked things off. I've seen Carolyn twice before at Pop!Tech. She's terrific. Passionate, informative and inspiring. In a theme that would emerge (no pun intended) several times throughout the day, Carolyn knows how to speak to lay audiences about complex matters. Perhaps her subject matter lends itself to comprehension by general audiences (I really don't think so) or perhaps she's just good. But her description of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, was vivid: "the surface is dark and cold with large lakes of paint thinner."  Technical problems rattled her just a tad but curator Chris Anderson leaped to her side to give the techies a chance to wrestle Windows into reluctant submission. Very good start.

Late addition David Berlinski presented medical images rich in what he called "truth and beauty," including this dramatically rendered video of kinesins, hard-working little intra-cellular protein delivery systems. Very effective presentation which I can sum up with this evocative Berlinski quote: "the cell is a huge bustling city populated by micro-machines."

Phillipe Starck followed. Starck is a hugely prolific designer, a veritable rock star in the world of architecture, home decor and fashion. I've never heard him speak before and I was taken aback by the depth of his talk. Starck's heavily-accented English may have made him difficult for some to completely understand but I think perhaps some TEDsters didn't completely follow his line of thought. What I heard was a master designer describing what he called the utter "uselessness" of his job. "I feel like shit," he said, following Porco and Berlinski. He then proceeded to describe a creative process that takes the human being who will use the object he designs, be it that citrus juicer over there, a toilet brush or a fancy toilet seat. The point, he said, is that someone, the product of billions of years of human evolution, a "super monkey" (whose evolutionary path Starck acted out with great glee and comic force!). The object will become part of the story, the poetry, of our species, which is now halfway in its nine billion year journey before the sun goes out. (This is not what people expected from this guy in a red football jacket, I'll bet.) Furthermore, while nobody is "obliged to be a genius," Starck said, we are all obliged to participate in the development of our species; to take up the duty of vision to raise ourselves toward civilization and away from barbarism. (Whew! What the hell, Phillipe? Tell us about shoes or something, will ya?) No, he kept on. The point is, that at different points in our evolutionary cycle the task of humanity differs. At some moments (like now) "people like me, or like artists, are acceptable" because of the luxury of having barbarism at bay (foreshadowing Steven Pinker's talk about the relative calm of the current moment when compared with any other point in human history). At other moments, it's not. "We are almost gods now," he said and soon we will be able to hand our children a world in which they can take advantage of all the progress which we've made and say to them, "now, write a new poetry, a new story," the only requirement being that their story be different from ours. "And this," he concluded, "is why I work, if only on toilet brushes."

Steven Pinker concluded the first session with another brilliantly counter-intuitive talk. While it's common for we 20th/21st century citizens to decry the barbaric atrocities of our age, Pinker effectively demonstrated that we are living in the most non-violent, civilized age in history. This phenomenon is "fractally" demonstrable, meaning it is true across orders of magnitude of time and space. As hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago up to 60% of humans died due to warfare. Today, less than 1% do. There is also significantly less torture, one-on-one murder and violence of all kinds. Well, then, why don't we feel better about ourselves? Pinker cited several  reasons, including better reporting (the damned media really is to blame!), the psychological phenomenon of "cognitive illusion" (things that are easy to recall are assigned higher probabilities of occurrence than those that aren't) and, what he called the "opinion and advocacy market" ("it's hard to make the news by saying things are getting better.") He then cited four reasons for the decline in violence: the deterrent element of civilization (you will go to jail, after all), the decline of the notion that life is cheap (read the Bible lately? lots of smiting), the non-zero sum effects of cooperation and the idea of the "expanding circle" of empathy (here he cited one of my favorite themes, "there but for fortune.") He concluded by asking these provocative questions: "why is there peace?"; "what have we been doing right?"

And with that, the first session ended. And so will my recount of Day One.

Good night!

TED Times

Well, imagine my surprise when I sat down this morning to eat my Wheaties and there on the front page of the New York Times Business section was Chris Anderson's picture and this very well-presented story on the TED Conference. (warning, this is a Flash presentation with audio, so have speakers adjusted before clicking.) Chris deserves a tremendous amount of credit for taking Richard Saul Wurman's brainchild and successfully making it his own. So successfully, in fact, that it's now next to impossible for newcomers to enroll. Wisely realizing the enormous power of the ideas presented at TED, Chris has made videos of the conference available here. I urge you to poke around. Prepare to be wowed.

TED starts on Wednesday and, as usual, I'm very excited. Over the years (this is my seventh TED) I've come to expect several things about the Monterey event.

1. I'll learn something about something I've never heard of before.
2. At least one speaker will be disappointing.
3. I'll meet several new people who will impress me with both the breadth and depth of their knowledge and experience (last year, Larry Brilliant blew the top of my head off.)
4. Somewhere in Day Two I'll start to feel overloaded.
5. I'll try to blog the entire conference but will end up feeling totally inadequate when compared with Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani.
6. The drum circle will be fun.
7. The TED Prize winners will be inspiring.
8. I'll get to renew acquaintances with people I only see once a year in Monterey and wonder why I don't maintain closer contact with them the rest of the year.
9. I'll be reminded that California is very different from New York.
10. I'll have my faith in humanity recharged as I spend time among 1,000 or so passionate, committed people.
11. One or two moments will shine beyond all others (last year for me it was Hans Rosling (again, an autostart Flash presentation) who is returning to the conference on Wednesday...a gutsy thing to do, for sure!)

And that's why I keep going back.

I'll do my best to blog and vlog the event.

More Thoughts About YouTube and Businesses

A few days ago I mentioned that I was getting ready to head to TED and was preparing a mini-seminar on YouTube vlogging. I posted a video in which I asked viewers to give me their ideas for the talk (utilizing the time-honored consultant technique of borrowing someone's watch in order to tell them them time.) To date I've received 40 comments and one thoughtful video response which I'm posting here, with the kind permission of its producer.

Now, you may, or may not see the ideas in that video as relevant for your own business. Obviously, that's not the point. The point, as respondent nevik192 says below, is that you must take the issue of web video into account in some form or other if you do not want your current online presence to look very, oh, let's call it 2001.

[Why use YouTube?] From a small business perspective it’s easy. I run a solar energy website and before we placed audio on the site the conversion rate was 3%, which was very good. But when we inserted an audio interview the conversion rate went up to 5%. We then added a video that showed how the product worked and the conversion rate went to 9%. If audio and video can do this then all business[es] now need to come to terms with this or get left...behind.

I'm preparing for this mini-seminar now and enjoying the opportunity to step back and look at a few of the lessons I've learned in the 10 months I've been involved in YouTube.

I'll let you now how the seminar goes and do my best to provide my usual TED round-ups from Monterey.