From Evan Williams to Seth Godin - here are just a few recent and exceptional talks from TED in 2010, with a specific focus on social media and the changing role of technology.
How Social Media Can Make History
Clay Shirky discusses the unprecedented immediacy of real-time citizen journalism made possible by social media and the nearly ubiquitous access to mobile web technologies. Shirky discusses how media is made on the ground, as-it-happens, via the social web.
The Tribes We Lead
From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.
Make a Splash in Social Media
How the biggest and most effective forces on the web usually take shape by accident. Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all-powerful and it cannot be controlled.
Listening to Twitter Users
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discusses how a little side project called Twitter became a game-changing phenomenon with the help and input of the very users who made the service a success. From innovative marketing uses to core functionality, Williams provides the evidence for what we knew all along: Users know best.
How the Internet Enables Intimacy
Stefana Broadbent explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space.
