Alright. I admit it. I love TED. I even have a TED app on my iPhone. I hate being predictable.

TED are 18 minute lectures by smart, interesting, and pretentious people. They use PowerPoint presentations to amp up their talks. Their talks are devoid of the usual stuff that makes smart people boring, like facts, citations, graphs, numbers, nuance, evidence. I particularly love the lectures on topics that I know nothing about. It provides me with chatter topics. I find lectures on topics that I know a lot about really frustrating and facile.

The audience for the TED talks probably neatly correlates with New Yorker readership. And blog reader demographics. Sigh. Sometimes I think I need to stop collecting random bits of information like Cliff Clavin. 

Anya Kamenetz from Fast Company talks to Chris Anderson about TED. She writes, "By combining the principles of "radical openness" and of "leveraging the
power of ideas to change the world," TED is in the process of creating
something brand new. I would go so far as to argue that it's creating a
new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than
100 years."

James Joyner doesn't think that watching videos of a lecture could ever replace a university.

The information in these TED talks is too thin to be a real lecture. They aren't really designed to replace a college class, but they could be. It's not too hard to imagine a TED-style University of Phoenix with the superstars giving lectures and an army of TAs grading tests.

While it isn't a proper lecture, Anderson sure has built up a successful brand. 

http://video.fastcompany.com/plugins/player.swf?v=a86a331403bed&p=fc_social