TED Blog

A good day for the world. The Encyclopedia of Life is launched.

Those of us in Monterey for TED2007 this year watched in awe as E O Wilson unveiled his inspiring TED Prize wish to create an Encyclopedia of Life. (You can see his talk here... or download it in HD.)

In Washington DC this morning, we saw the first big step toward granting the wish. Five major scientific institutions, backed by a $50m funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, announced the launch of a major global effort to launch the Encyclopedia.  The press conference included a video message from Britain's Environment Minister David Miliband who said the "full weight of the British government" was behind the project.  Ed Wilson told journalists today's announcement was a dream come true.

As Ed hinted in his speech back in March, this broad-based effort to plan the launch was already underway. But I am proud to tell you that members of the TED community, inspired by Ed's wish, played a key role in realizing what happened today.

In particular I'd like to salute the effort of Avenue A-Razorfish who in three short weeks were able to visualize a stunning design for the Encyclopedia and incorporate it in a video that is the centerpiece of the newly launched website.  Please take a couple minutes right now to watch this video. It does a spectacular job of explaining the purpose and vision behind the Encylopedia.  It is here at www.eol.org.  This work was done entirely pro bono, and is a wonderful example of the TED Prize at work.  Everyone at the launch today was blown away by it.

The video includes spectacular photography some of it contributed by TEDster Frans Lanting.  And the website itself was contributed by an individual inspired by Ed's wish. Programmer Ray Ratelis owned eol.org, a valuable web address which he freely contributed to the project.

Many more TEDsters are meeting next month to assist the project in brainstorming its architecture, technology and design.   It's proving an exhilarating example of the power of collaboration.

There are already many stories up online about the Encylopedia. Here's the official announcement.

The Venice Project: 507 channels and somethin' on

After disrupting music distribution with file-sharing system Kazaa, and upsetting telecommunications with Voice-over-IP service Skype, TEDGLOBAL speaker Niklas Zennström and his accomplice Janus Friis have now set their sights on television. Their project is code-named "Venice". Little is known so far, but given their history, it's likely to be based on peer-to-peer distribution technology. Their austere homepage (where you can apply to become a beta tester) says they want to

combine the best things about television with the social power of the Internet - a project that gives viewers, advertisers and content owners more choice, control and creativity than ever before.

On his blog, Friis added recently a few more details:

It’s simple, really — we are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass medias of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes…) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on… TV is 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that!

Om Malik asked him a few additional questions, and Friis added that they will be using the same core technology on which Skype is built (which means that they're likely to use some of the users' CPU and bandwidth to make the system work). He added:

Like Skype, The Venice Project is simple - you download and you get free television. It is near television quality, and it needs about one megabit per second. [The business model will be] ad-based, close to the television model. We will do revenue share with the content providers.

So, to summarize: streaming peer-to-peer television; free to the user (just download the client software); ad-supported (with ad targeting); revenue-shares with content providers; time-shifted; searchable; with "social TV" features (tagging, recommendations, etc); potentially infinite number of channels.

Assuming that they can get the technology to work, the key portion will be striking deals with content providers (Many of these have tested the waters recently with downloads on iTunes and others. So it won't be surprising if they jump on board). I haven't seen anything about user-generated content, but presumably that will be part of the model, too.

(Cross-posted on LunchOverIP)

SearchMash: Google's other search site

TED partner Google is newly operating a separate search site: SearchMash. It was unveiled a few days ago, has a very simple homepage (no ads) and produces roughly the same results as the main Google search. But it also displays the top three relevant images, and has a few Ajax features that let you for example click the URL of a search result to get a menu of options, drag the results to re-order them (paving the way to a possible collective refinement of the search), or view more results without having to move to another page. SearchMash has attracted both criticism and praise, but it's clearly mostly a playground for developers to test new ideas using Google tools and technologies in different ways. The creation of this new, separate, un-branded sandbox reveals - despite the "chaos by design" recently eulogized by Fortune - that Google's main page has become a very delicate object, which doesn't allow for experimentation anymore.

On another note, Google is rumored to be considering a purchase of video-sharing site YouTube.

Ze Frank on TEDTalks

Ze Frank rose to Internet fame in 2001 with his viral video How to Dance Properly, and has been a purveyor of imaginative online comedy ever since. His latest experiment, the show, is posted daily at zefrank.com. In this performance, drawn from the TED2004 archive, he offers the signature blend of comedy, technology and social theory that made him our favorite philosopher comic. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 19:42)

More TEDTalks: TEDTalks website | iTunes (audio) | iTunes (video)

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Mena Trott on TEDTalks

Mena Trott is the 28-year-old founder of leading blog software company Six Apart (Creators of Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal and Vox). In this talk, she explores the personal side of blogging. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 17:30)

Download this talk: Audio (MP3) | Video (MP4)

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Jimmy Wales on TEDTalks

Jimmy Wales is founder of Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, ever-expanding, and thoroughly addictive encyclopedia of the future. In this presentation, he explains how Wikipedia's collaborative system works, and why it succeeds. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 20:47)

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Quote of the week: Malcolm Gladwell

"I think I speak for all writers, when I say that I am delighted by marketing efforts of any sort."

— Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell, commenting in The Guardian on film-style trailers for books, being released online by publishers to build demand for new titles

TED BookClub: The Long Tail

The Long Tail
By Chris Anderson
Published by Hyperion
256 pages | List price: $24.95

This month's TED Book Club mailing included a pre-publication copy of the book that's been generating so much buzz for the past year, The Long Tail. (It was published this week by Hyperion.) Several important things to say. First of all, despite the kudos I've received for this all year, the author is not me but "the other" Chris Anderson, the brilliant editor of Wired. Chris's stunningly powerful thesis is all here.... and it's much, much more than the original article that exploded around the web a couple years back. Some have described it as the key idea driving the Web 2.0 revolution, showing clearly how and why millions of new businesses and voices are flourishing in our new connected economy. It's one of those books that anyone remotely interested in business or marketing or communication in the Internet age just has to read.

What does a search engine look like?

In the words of Swiss technophilosopher René Berger, "It's becoming impossible not to visit with Google daily". But when you do, what do you visit exactly? In other words: what does a search engine really look like? It actually looks like this:

This picture of Google's new server farm in The Dalles, Oregon was published a couple weeks ago in the New York Times. The facility, which is under construction, is only one of several Google data centers, but John Markoff and Saul Hansell in their article speculate that it may "soon be one of the world's most powerful supercomputers". TED sponsor Google is known primarily as a search engine, they write, but it is actually "foremost an effort to build a network of supercomputers (...) that can process more data, faster and cheaper than its rivals". The choice of The Dalles as the location of the data center has apparently to do with the availability of low-cost electricity (the grey structures protruding from the two football-field-sized buildings on the left are cooling towers) and easy access to data networks.

Markoff and Hansell have some interesting figures: In March 2001, when Google was serving about 70 million pages a day, its computing system had about 8'000 servers; by 2003 that number had grown to 100'000. Today "the best guess is that Google has more than 450'000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world". For comparison, they write, Microsoft's Internet activities currently use some 200'000 servers. In a recent Fortune article TED regular David Kirkpatrick puts the number of Google servers around the world at one million and confirms that Microsoft is also investing billions in infrastructure. Kirkpatrick quotes Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: "Just think about where there are windmills, dams, and other natural power sources around the world: that's where you're going to see server farms".

Ze Frank and his wikicomedy

There's been a lot of talk in TED HQ lately about The Show. That is, Ze Frank's show. The one he writes, films and posts each weekday, as a result of a New Year's resolution. (Many of you will remember Ze's resolutions from TED2005). With this new daily format, Ze's really hit his stride. But over the last few weeks, he's stumbled on yet another winning idea: recruiting viewers to write the show for him.

Tired of virtual heckling, he invited the nay-sayers to come up with a script (If you're so funny, YOU write the show.) What's resulted is a sort of wiki-comedy, where fans collaborate to put words in Ze's mouth (and props on his lap). Their freshman effort: Fabuloso Friday may be more fascinating than funny, per se. But we're staying tuned for more. And we're not the only ones: This entertaining profile of Ze and The Show (complete with the photo at left) snagged a front-page slot on the NYT Sunday Styles section.

Robert Wright's "Meaning of Life TV"

Did you know that Robert Wright (TED2006), author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero, hosts an interview program called Meaning of Life TV on Slate? Me neither. But I wasn't surprised to see the guest list filled with TED favorites (Dan Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Edward Wilson...), exploring the territory where physics meets philosophy: Do indidividual atoms make choices? Does the mystery of consciousness suggest some higher purpose to the universe? Note: Wright also asks Steven Pinker the burning question. Maybe Malcolm Gladwell's next?

Learning from the "New Golf"

Like many of you, when a new technology strikes my fancy, I try to learn as much about it as possible.  These days I'm interested in how the internet can enable better collaboration within design teams.  But instead of reading white papers, I'm practicing what a few of us have started to call the "New Golf".  In other words, I'm playing a video game called World of Warcraft (WoW). 

With all due respect to Salesforce.com, in my opinion it's WoW that's really cracked the "software as service" subscription business model.   For $15 a month, I can go online with millions of my closest friends and adventure around a Tolkien-ish virtual world full of elves and trolls, dungeons and dragons.  Yeah, it's geeky, but it's an extremely compelling experience... lush, beautiful, entertaining.  Amazing.

So what have I learned?  First, it really is the New Golf: WoW facilitates surprisingly rich social interactions between players.  In WoW I’ve set up meetings, arranged introductions, even asked for a favor or two.  All the things that used to happen at a country club can now occur in this online space, only with an order of magnitude more people and without the limitations of geography or tee times. 

Second, this is the first time that I’ve seen the internet really live up to its potential to enhance the performance of far-flung teams.  It’s amazing what gets accomplished in WoW – complex objectives are routinely solved using a combination of top-down leadership, individual creativity, and emergent strategies.  WoW is a prototyping lab for new paradigms of collaboration.

The most important – and honestly, most surprising – thing I’ve learned in WoW is how it forges genuine, we’ve-been-through-hell-together friendships.  Understand that when we’re online we all sport faux screen names and assume the look of imaginary elves and gnomes and trolls and orcs, so it took me a while to figure out that I was adventuring alongside web gurus like Joi Ito, Don Park, and Ross Mayfield.  In fact, that’s Don, Joi, me, and my pet bear in the photo above. Through WoW, I’ve come to trust these guys in the same way I trust my real-world collaborators. 

We can a lot about the future of work from the state of the art in entertainment. 

CompanyWatch: FON

Lots of commentary in the blogosphere this week on 3-month-old start-up FON, which just received backing from Google and Skype, as well as Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. FON provides a model for expanding wireless internet access across the world, by offering subscribers financial incentives for sharing their bandwidth. Their goal is to become the largest hotspot network in the world. Their model was described neatly by Ethan Zuckerman, who is on FON's board of US advisers (and who will attend TED this year):

By joining FON, you agree to share your internet bandwidth with other users either as a "Linus" or a "Bill". If you’re a Linus (ala Linus Torvalds), you allow your router to be open to other Foneros around the world, which, as FON spreads, means you’ll be increasingly likely to find free wireless access as your travel. If you’re a Bill (ala Bill Gates), you can charge people for accessing your bandwidth and split the revenues with FON. If you’re not a member of FON, you're an "Alien" - you can gain access to a FON hotspot for significantly less than you’d pay to use TMobile or a similar public WiFi service.

Ethan also gives thoughts on why sharing WiFi's a cool technology for Africa. TEDGlobal Producer Bruno Giussani provides context. And FON founder Martin Varsavsky explains his vision.

MemeWatch: Evil Search Engines

Everyone loves to love Google. With its uncluttered interface, useful services and utterly likeable founders (TEDsters both), what's not to like? But what if the friendly search engine revealed a sinister under-belly? What if it reneged on its corporate mantra, "Don't Be Evil." Such ponderings are fueling one of the most entertaining memes in the blogosphere: The Evil Search Engine Scenario. TEDGlobal producer Bruno Giussani and The Search author John Battelle have been swapping Hollywood-worthy stories of a world in which Google switches sides ....

Podcast: A real word, after all

No longer just a buzzword, "podcast" has now officially become a word. And not just any word. The New Oxford American Dictionary has declared it Word of the Year. "Podcast was considered for inclusion last year," Editor-in-Chief Erin McKean told the BBC. "But we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept. This year it's a completely different story."

LA Times: Hollywood is losing race with zeitgeist

You don't have to be an industry insider to know that media habits are changing. But in case you missed the warning signs, today's Los Angeles Times gives it to you straight. Hollywood, the headline declares, is "in a losing race with the zeitgeist." Box office sales are down; DVD sales are down. "The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close."

It's hardly a new story, of course; we've been talking about it at TED for years. But it's now playing out in real-time: Digital technologies — from Tivo to the iPod to always-on internet connections — are causing a sea change in Hollywood, as people individualize their entertainment experiences. And this trend will only accelerate once Tivo users can download programs to their iPods (a plan announced yesterday). As the L.A. Times points out, "Hollywood needs a new mindset, one that sees a movie as something that comes in all shapes and sizes, not something that is wedded to the big screen." The same could be said for all media, from newspapers to record labels. You can't fight the zeitgeist.

An astonishing sentence...

...is the lead in today's Wall Street Journal online (as of 8am).  Few who experienced the melt-down of online advertising-based business models 5 years ago would have imagined that on this day in 2005 they would read the following at the top of the WSJ's news agenda:

YAHOO, AOL, MSN and other leading Web sites are selling out ad space far in advance, allowing for big rate increases...

Despite the exhilarating turnaround of web advertising in the last three years, logic says we've only just started. The ultimate asset in the media business is "attention" and on the simplest measure of attention -- eyeball hours --  the Internet's share is a significant multiple of its dollar-share. For example nationally, the Internet attracts around one sixth as many ad dollars as TV... Do YOU spend six times as much of your time and attention watching Tivo-free television? 

Over time, dollars will adjust to mindshare. The flow of money into Internet advertising is only going to accelerate.