TED is a great website everything about it is well planned out and well executed. They won 3 Webby Awards this year for best navigation/structure, best visual design - function and for their Podcasts.
You can see why their wins were richly deserved when you have a good look at their site. Everything is geared towards making the site as engaging and intuitive for the user as possible.
The sites driving purpose is to engage users in real issues.
The goal of the foundation is to foster the spread of great ideas. It aims to provide a platform for the world’s smartest thinkers, greatest visionaries and most-inspiring teachers, so that millions of people can gain a better understanding of the biggest issues faced by the world, and a desire to help create a better future. Core to this goal is a belief that there is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea.”
And they have provided a platform on which the “spread of great ideas” can indeed happen.
They suggest in their “Our Mission (You can help)” section that you can post their videos in your own blog and start a debate around them. They are clearly looking for a very specific audience who are already engaged in the issues talked about on their website and want to then to go off and create their own debate.
I am particularly interested to look more at how setting debates in contextualized digital space, as TED do on their website makes the content presented to users more meaningful than if the content is set outside their own space and in a collective environment like YouTube
I am glad to see that TED also have a YouTube channel on which all of the videos found on their own website are uploaded.
Let’s take a quick look at one example of the same content being shown in 2 different settings. Brian Cox made a presentation recently about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and they have posted the video on TED and YouTube.
- TED version
Views: N/A
Comments: 73
- YouTube version
Views: 95,900
Comments: 304
YouTube has obviously given this video a much larger audience and reaction than it would have otherwise achieved set on TED alone. AET has increased as a result of the multiple placements. But depth and quality of the debate veers off on Youtube slightly less focused than that on TED.
You are only going to watch this video on YouTube if you are genuinely interested in the subject matter. And then you are only going to comment on it if you have an opinion on what has been discussed or want to react to another opinion that has been expressed and want to debate. So in this sence it is as valuable and engaging a place to present the video as on the TED website.
Setting the same content in sites with different audiences is a good thing because the content gains a larger audience to engage, which brings more value to the producers, sponsors and users of the content.
For a non-profit based organization like TED their is really no downside to presenting their content on YouTube. If commercial profit based websites are going to make the most of YouTube then you have to partner with them or make the content on YouTube viral and lead users back to your own property.
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