TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design

For years people have been mentioning TED to me. But it was only after hearing about it on radio that I signed up (thus the power of old media). TED standards for "Technology, Entertainment, Design" and is a not for profit organisation which has been running conferences since 1984. They now have a web site where anyone can watch videos or inspiring speakers and enter discussions. There are also two annual conferences, in California and Oxford and some in Asia.

TED is not perfect. It has a bit too much of that USA East Coast enthusiasm in it for my liking. Also I had some difficulty with the web site, which is a little too Web 2.0 to work well on my low bandwidth wireless set-up. I was not able to upload a photo for my profile.

While I was at it I ran some tested on the TED home page. It gets a poor score of 30/100 on the W3C Mobile test. The page has 48 errors on a W3C HTML test. It had 4 Priority One and 7 Priority Two problems on the TAW automated Accessibility test. These are things TED need to fix if they want to achieve their aims of speeding ideas more widely across the world.