How the TED conference exploded in popularity—spawning a host of competitors, copycats and aspiring TED talkers:
“Until recently, the universal self-actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them. There are people on YouTube who upload webcammed soliloquies about whatever and title them things like ‘My TED Talk.’ There’s now even a genre of meta–TED Talks. For a TEDActive talk in 2010, Sebastian Wernicke, a statistician, crunched the data of extant TED Talks to reverse-engineer both the best- and worst-possible talks. Elements common to the most popular TED Talks, he determined good-humoredly, included using certain words (‘coffee,’ ‘happiness’), feeling free to ‘fake intellectual capacity and just say et cetera et cetera,’ and growing your hair long. He created an app, the TEDPAD, a kind of TED-omatic that can generate ‘amazing and really bad’ TED Talks.”
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