Comments on: Did you ever start out watching a Ted Talk but then wished it would wrap up quickly because you have stuff to do?

By: F

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:55:59 +0000

Lol, I watch video so little that I didn’t even know about this “thing” with TED as described by the OP or the comments.

Give me nothing, or give me text. I don’t listen to “podcasts” or whateverthehell, either. Which is a bummer sometimes, but that is my loss. (Rebecca Watson, for example, is highly intelligent and interesting to hear.)

By: uqbar

uqbar — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:13:52 +0000

TED talks rub me the wrong way for some reason – they always seem pretentious, condescending, and elitist all at the same time. Even when the presenter is an otherwise nice person, the venue works against them. And as bks points out, way too many videos are time wasters that could better communicate with a little bit of text.

Memorable TED talks:

How Poor People Could Improve Time to Market Using their Mercedes

Fighting Malarial Mosquitoes With Basic High Powered Computers, Precision Optical Sensors, and other stuff I’m sure the Average Person at Risk has or Could Get.

Watch Me Be Cool while discussing an Outlandish Idea based on stuff I pulled out of my …

————-

I may have one or two of those wrong, but that’s the way I remember them.

By: bks

bks — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 03:37:52 +0000

Yes, video often sucks. For example, talkingpointsmemo.com, which has a lot of good stuff, spends way, way too much time making videos that could be better summarized in a paragraph. I have completely stopped watching them. If the topic seem interesting I google it. By the time the video starts playing I can read five versions of the story.

Similarly, consider a slide-show of the “top-ten ideas” versus a simple textual list. The first takes maybe 100x as long to work through as does the latter.

Now the camouflaged octopus –that required a video! Ted Talks, not so much.

–bks