Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The New TED and Chapter-marking

by David Jacques

TED, "known for its annual invitation-only summit of the world's brightest minds" as the April 16, 2007 press release put it, has just launched a revamped TED (www.ted.com) Web site. The free site, which already featured great talks by some of the world’s leading thinkers, has just gotten better.

Some of the improvements include new full-length TED talks, a new way to browse talks by theme such as "How the Mind Works", "Tales of Invention" and "Presentation Innovation", a unique rating system by adjective and high-resolution video.

But perhaps the best improvement on the Web site is chapter-marking, which I see as a long-awaited innovation in online video because it much better matches how people use the Web.

So far videos on the Web, including those on the popular YouTube, played pretty much the same way film and video played in the last century. The format was only well suited for watching a video linearly from start to finish. Even if most video players allow users to jump further in the timeline by clicking on the timeline bar or position indicator, jumping in the timeline is pretty much guesswork unless you know exactly at which minute and second you want to jump to.

While you can still watch the entire video linearly without interruption, chapter marking allows you to jump to specific topics within one talk with minimal load time. Placing the mouse above the video simply pulls out descriptive annotations along the timeline, allowing you to find just that right part of the talk. DVDs do allow chapter selection but it has never been implemented as elegantly as it is here.

The next step in the evolution of video should be searchable content. But that will require a verbatim text of the speech audio tracks, which may be eventually be done automatically through good speech-to-text technology unless it is manually typed.

One of my favorite TED talks is What we can learn from spaghetti sauce from Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink (if you read Customer input Journal but didn’t read Blink, go buy it now; It’s much better.). I often get people to watch this to better understand the kind of work we do. This inspiring talk discusses how people have individual tastes, and shows how companies can benefit from understanding and delivering on them. And Gladwell delivers the stories superbly.

As TED's tagline reads: "Ideas worth spreading".

About the author: David Jacques is Founder and Principal Consultant of Customer input. He is specialized in human-computer interaction, usability and qualitative research techniques.

Comments from readers

No further comment can be added on this post.