Above, a TED talk that’s absolutely worthy of your time.
But the real reason I’m linking to it is because I’d like to mention a few things that the TED.com site does that I love.
Okay, so go open the site in a new window. On the right sidebar, next to “About this talk,” click on “Open interactive transcript.” Here’s the genius of the feature: you can click on any sentence in the transcript, and the video will automatically scroll to that part of the talk.
Then, below the video, click on the red button that says “Rate.” Instead of a YouTube style one-to-five rating system, you’ll have the option of clicking on words like “jaw-dropping” or “informative” or “longwinded,” so that you end up with a rating system not unlike The New York Times’ word train. It’s the man-on-the-street perspective, but for online video.
And one more thing: below the video, there are five options. You can download the audio or the video directly to your desktop. You can download the audio or video as a podcast through iTunes. Or you can watch it online in high resolution.
The lesson for those in the news industry: you should package your original content in as many ways as is possible and sensible.