27 August 2009

Celebrating the 500th TEDTalk!

Today, TED.com releases its 500th TEDTalk: perennial favorite Hans Rosling’s latest data-bubble presentation from TED@State. Since April 2007, the TED.com site has selected the best talks and performances from TED and partner conferences around the world and made them available to everyone online, for free. In keeping with TED’s mission to spread ideas, these talks have been reposted, shared among friends and shown in classrooms from middle schools to colleges.

Reaching 500 TEDTalks is an amazing milestone, and one that was not entirely expected. The experiment of putting talks online has blossomed into a thriving web community of fans and friends of TED, in ways that no one could have predicted. One blogger has made it her goal to watch absolutely all of the TEDTalks (for a spreadsheet that includes every TEDTalk, click here). Our incredibly dedicated volunteer translators have helped us provide TEDTalks in dozens of different languages. And, on our Facebook page, fans discuss and debate on the talks as they go up, creating strings of conversation that often extend into hundreds of comments. At TED, we’ve worked very hard to reach 500 talks, but we couldn’t have done without you.

Discuss this Blog Post

srini n
Aug 27 2009
500 TED talks since in 29 months (since April 2007). Take a bow, TED!
Great variety of topics with matching depth and quality.
Ankur Jalota
Aug 27 2009
I watch one TedTalk every morning. =)
auzenda silva
Aug 27 2009
Inspiring People with quality. Please “Be the change that we want to see in the world.” Tank you
Dave Lim TM
Aug 28 2009
If you were to spend 12 hours a day doing nothing but continuously watching TED Talks, it would take you 12.5 days to watch them all ! ;-) That will be quite a TED Talk marathon! Dave, curator TEDxSingapore
Alex W
Aug 28 2009
I’m the blogger watching all the videos (here’s an update of where I’m up to – http://101ofawolf.blogspot.com/2009/08/day-0240-quick-update-on-ted-videos.html) and I am delighted it is Hans Rosling who gets the 500th video – he was one of my favourite video stars to watch so far! I’m also really starting to get excited about going to TEDxLeeds on September 10th – http://www.tedxnorth.com/leeds09/index.php. ::whirling in excitement::
mary jones
Aug 28 2009
NEWS | CNNNEWS.MY248.COM | http://cnnnews.my248.com/
sophie van der walt
Aug 28 2009
This is a great addition to the TED site – it makes it so much easier to find an author or topic I’m interested in! I’ve managed to watch only about 10 of the videos but I’m blown away by the quality of the speakers and the great variety just as srini n mentioned above. Well done TED!