TED2009: 25th anniversary – daily updated.

I love the TED Talks series, been listening to it/watching them many times. Now, TED2009 is currently happening. It’s the 25th anniversary, and the videos are updated daily on the TED website as well as on YouTube. Did they have a blog last year? This year they do, with daily updates.

The talks are always highly inspirational. Like this one here, Bill Gross on „Great Ideas for finding new energy“, something I am currently very much interested in:

Firebrand launched – so what?

Firebrand now launched, and it has a wide selection of TV commercials online to watch. You can filter them by brand, animation, celebrity, etc. I particularly like the filter-selection „banned“, which could be quite promising in the future.

What I miss: you can’t comment on the ads. You can rate them, but not comment on them. Might be due to lack of editorial staff, and I hope that is the only reason. Because some say, it might be, because advertisers have expressed concerns about people commenting on ads.

firebrand.jpg
One intelligent feature: as you can see on the screenshot above: offers of the advertisers can be integrated as clickable banners. Not sure if that always corresponds to what has been shown in the ad, but it would make sense.

So who will actually use this? Some people who seek entertainment? They would go to YouTube, wouldn’t they? And the ad folks? Only if this becomes more complete than other ad databases (including YouTube).

And what about including good print advertising?

Digital Attention Deficit Trait…

So this how people get alienated these days: by having too many digital connections with others. Says this article on Forbes.

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected–or more alienated

There is a lot of Klischee stuff in that article, but yet some good quotes:

The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures success by calls made, e-mails answered and messages responded to.

We live a contradiction: Insisting that our world is increasingly complex, we nevertheless have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted.

One thought, though, takes it a little over the top, I think:

One says, „I don’t have enough time alone with my mind“; another, „I artificially make time to think.“ Such formulations depend on an „I“ separate from the technology, a self that can put the technology aside so as to function apart from its demands. But it’s in conflict with a growing reality of lives lived in the presence of screens, whether on a laptop, palmtop, cell phone or BlackBerry. We are learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices. To put it most starkly: To make more time means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture. But this is not a simple proposition, since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and increasingly feel like extensions of our minds.

(found on the „cult of the amateur“ blog.)