TED organizers announced Friday morning that past TED talks, which the conference has posted on its web site, have been viewed more than 100 million times. At least six talks have been translated into 25 languages, with subtitles. And coming soon, TED will launch a service that allows anyone in the world to translate any talk they want.
More than that, however, all TED talks will include an interactive transcription that runs alongside the talk that will allow users to scroll through while watching the video. They can also search for words in the text, click on it, and jump immediately to that spot in the TED talk video. The search capability will expand to Google so that if someone searches for keywords that appear in the transcript, the TED talk will pop up in the Google results and link to the spot in the video associated with the keywords.
“We really believe that for the way for this to work is to allow this to spread in a grassroots way,” TED organizer June Cohen told the audience.
The idea was inspired by work that Ethan Zuckerman has done for Global Voices, TED organizer June Cohen told the audience. Zuckerman works on special projects with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
I’ve posted a couple of the most popular talks. You can find others on the TED web site.
