5 Essential TED Talks for Bloggers

I love TED talks. Essentially, TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talks are videos that allow experts- on a variety of topics- to get their ideas to a large audience. These talks range from "the smelly mystery of the human pheromone" and "how to separate fact and fiction online" to classics such as "my journey to yo-yo mastery".

And since the TED app allows me to save these 'talks' for offline viewing during my commute, I am able to keep myself entertained by a large amount of information. And oftentimes I am watching something and I think "I know someone who could use this information". And, so I've been keeping a list to share with you.


5 TED Talks That Bloggers Need to Watch.

1. Mena Trott: Meet the founder of the blog revolution

"It's these sort of personal stories. You know, you read the blogs about politics, or about media, and gossip and all these things. These are out there, but it's more of the personal that interests me, and this is -- this is who I am.

You see Norman Rockwell. And you have art critics say, "Norman Rockwell is not art. Norman Rockwell hangs in living rooms and bathrooms, and this is not something to be considered high art." And I think this is one of the most important things to us as humans. These things resonate with us, and, if you think about blogs, you think of high art blogs, the history paintings about, you know, all biblical stories, and then you have this. These are the blogs that interest me: the people who just tell stories."

2. Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days

"I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days. Have you ever wanted to write a novel? Every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel from scratch in 30 days. It turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month. So I did. By the way, the secret is not to go to sleep until you've written your words for the day. "

3. Jennifer Golbeck: The curly fry conundrum: Why social media “likes” say more than you might think

"If you remember that first decade of the web, it was really a static place. You could go online, you could look at pages, and they were put up either by organizations who had teams to do it or by individuals who were really tech-savvy for the time. And with the rise of social media and social networks in the early 2000s, the web was completely changed to a place where now the vast majority of content we interact with is put up by average users, either in YouTube videos or blog posts or product reviews or social media postings. And it's also become a much more interactive place, where people are interacting with others, they're commenting, they're sharing, they're not just reading."

4. Adam Ostrow: After your final status update

"By the end of this year, there'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites. The one thing that all of them have in common is that they're going to die. While that might be a somewhat morbid thought, I think it has some really profound implications that are worth exploring.

What first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by Derek K. Miller, who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer. And what Miller did was have his family and friends write a post that went out shortly after he died...."

5. Neil Pasricha: The 3 A's of awesome

"And as these dark clouds were circling me, and I was finding it really, really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow. So I came home from work one night, and I logged onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.com. I was trying to remind myself of the simple, universal, little pleasures that we all love, but we just don't talk about enough -- things like waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking, being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding, wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer, or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line -- even if you were last at the other line, swoop right in there.

And slowly over time, I started putting myself in a better mood."

So tell me...

Who else out there loves Ted talks? What are your favorites?