In the Internet Age, we think in little snippets, but TED has always stood out as an exception. Some of the greatest minds in the world give TED Talks, and TED.com has shared the videos with the world for years. The talks go for 18 minutes, a long time for Internet stuff, but they’re so illuminating that it’s hard not to pay rapt attention.
Nevertheless, information travels faster and farther in short bursts. To reach more minds, TED has launched TED Quotes today, which lets fans send hand-picked text excerpts from TED Talks like little valentines. The quotes link back to their source video. “Quotes are ideas – in their most compressed and contagious form,” says June Cohen, TED Media’s executive producer. You can now send these contagious quotes by Facebook, Twitter or email and help them go viral.
You can browse and search for quotes at TED.com/quotes. They also appear at the top of video pages. Quotes are curated by TED, but you can suggest new ones by emailing quotes {at} ted.com. For the 2.0 version, it would be cool if TED viewers could highlight and share quotes themselves. But there are currently 1293 quotes selected, and that’s a lot of wisdom.
It would also be cool if these quotes were embeddable as a whole. For now, here’s a quote that resonated with me:
“The Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an age-old dilemma that pits the demands of security against the desire for freedom.”
– Misha Glenny
Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers!
See also: The 10 best TED Talks of 2011
