TEDxYouth goes big on November 20th

TED is a small group of nonprofit folks that started out in 1984 with a very simple credo: Ideas Worth Spreading. TED’s origins are derived from a series of conferences build around the theme of Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Since 1984 the concept, scope, and attendance of TED events have grown to massive proportions over the past 26 years. In addition to their annual TEDGlobal event held in Oxford, UK each summer, TED also conducts conferences in both Long Beach, and Palm Springs each spring.

Building on the theme of Ideas Worth Spreading, in 2009 the TED organization decided to allow others to host their own TED inspired events under the banner of TEDx. The first of these independent conferences was held at USC in 2009. Two days ago, on November 15th, 2010, TEDx celebrated it’s 1000th event; a true testament to the power of great ideas.

As mentioned, the TEDx events are independently organized, and there’s a very slim chance of two events overlapping anywhere in the world. However, this coming weekend, the exact opposite is about to happen, as TEDxYouthDay, which coincides with Universal Children’s Day will see organizers from around the world host events for (and by) youths. While the events range in size and scope, they will all share a common thread: inspiring curiosity, igniting new ideas, and empowering young leaders.

Some planned highlights from around the globe:

• TEDxYouth@NASA, who gave seats away for their event to area school districts to give to nominated student delegates, will include speakers from NASA including Jon Viet Nguyen, lead archtect for NASA’s “Eyes on the Solar System” software, and Lesa Roe, director of the country’s first civilian aeronautical research lab.
• TEDxYouth@TheSchool will be hosting speaker Stacey Murphy, founder of BK Farmyards, a nonprofit that turns private property into urban farms.
• One of TEDxYouth@Toronto‘s speakers is Rob Dyer, who founded Skate4Cancer, and skated across the United States and Canada to raise awareness for cancer, after finding out his mom was diagnosed with the disease.
• Kelly Stoetzel and Rives, hosts of TEDActive, will be hosting TEDxYouth@Castilleja, and speakers at the event include Twitter VP Kelly Stanton and Charles Huang, co-founder of Guitar Hero.
• At TEDxYouth@Metroplex, speakers are 8th- to 12th-grade students from three local ISAS schools in the community of Arlington, Texas.

And just what goes into a TEDx event? I personally have never organized one, but I’ve attended a number of them, and I can only say that while events, like the YouthDay, range in size and topics covered/presentation, I can confirm that these independently licensed conferences do their absolute best to emulate the TEDGlobal and Long Beach and Palm Springs events; Both in actual conference format, as well as the stellar archives of information available long after the event.

I had the pleasure to meet Dr. Sunddip Nahal via a project that I’ve been working on with MindMeister. She recently informed me that she’s been granted the license to host the TEDxYouthDay @ Vancouver – for 2011. That’s right. There’s an entire year of planning involved in hosting a TEDx event. If preparation is the key to success, you can imagine the bar that TEDx events are held to.

“I am SUPER EXCITED! I have always been an educator who believes that students should have a chance to let out their creativity and innovation in the classroom. This event is about encouraging students to learn from other students who have explored a creative concept or innovative idea. Youths also have the power to inspire change and make a difference,” comments Dr. Nahal.

Above is a mind map from Dr. Nahal’s presentation at this year’s TEDxUBC event. To learn more about her, and what she has in store for tomorrow’s leaders, visit her at www.classroommanagementworkshops.com.

The global TEDxYouthDay events kick off this coming Saturday, November 20th, 2010, and will be live streamed throughout the day.

Top 10 examples of Data Visualization

With the tremendous amount of data circulating the internet at any given moment, it’d be nice to see some graphic representations of what’s actually happening, instead of just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s.

Add to that the what would most certainly be a maddening exercise in trying to find related content to the mix, and data visualizations become all the more important.  These data visualizations below represent to me the most meaningful and useful tools available.  They cover everything from Digg activity to Network connectivity, to simply watching the world tweet the day away.

Music and Movies

Liveplasma is movie and music visualization app that allows you to see related musicians and movies you might enjoy based on your initial input.  Enter the name of your favorite band, film, artist, or director and Liveplasma will map corresponding links to other similar artists and represent their relevance by size.

Fidg’t uses both last.fm and flickr tags to allow you to visualize your network and their tagging activities.  A rather handy tool, as I noticed most people that photograph flowers also like classical music.  Perhaps this is just my network, but interesting to correlate the data.  You might be surprised at some of the trends you discover.

Digg, Twitter, and Flickr

Arc has been my screensaver for quite a while.  Not only does it track the latest stories on Digg, but also shows the relationships between users that are submitting and digging these articles.  Arc offers two different modes, one a blitzkrieg of (semi) real time output, and the other (my personal choice) is a bit slower, allowing you to actually read the story headlines.

Stack takes the functionality of Arc a bit further and shows stories with the most recent activity across the bottom of the screen.  New digs drop from the top of the screen and load on top of the most recent, and a real time graph visualizes the activity patterns.  As activity for one story or another increases, those decreasing in activity are brushed off the bottom of the screen.

TwittEarth is pure twitter joy.  This one uses geotagging of tweets to visualize a worldwide conversation.  Using a global map users are represented by cute often armless, pixar-like mosters, with their tweet visualized above their heads indicating user name and geographic location.  Maybe not the most productive of the visualization, but certainly one of the most fascinating to watch.

The Flickr Related Tag Browser is a might handy feature when either trying to narrow down a flickr search, or when simply flipping through the massive collection of images.  Using a chain-like sequence, by clicking on one related tag (those circling the original tag), users are presented with a Polaroid type image containing a selection of images that have been tagged with the search word.  A circle then surrounds the collection of images with associated tags.  If firehouse didn’t quite give you the image you were looking for, chances are Dalmatian is a related tag, and from there you might also explore sporting dogs to find that perfect Golden Retreiver image you were searching for.  On the flip side, expect a laugh or two when you realize others’ similar tagging preferences can lead you down a rather interesting path.

Teh Internetz

The Twingly Screensaver, which I use on my windows (only, sorry OSX peeps) machine pulls rss feeds and visualizes blog activity from around the world.  I always know when it’s 8am on the East Coast without even having to look at a clock.  Quite fun to watch America wake up and hit the ‘publish’ button.

The Web Trend Map 4 reminds me a bit of the Los Angeles subway map on a quiet day, and something akin to the Moscow subway system on a busy day.  While this is the fourth version of this tool, I only became away of it via twitter, where I regularly watch internet trends via twitscoop.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get a screenshot last Thursday, but as you can imagine, all roads lead to Michael Jackson.

Others

The TED Sphere is one of the most enjoyable ways to navigate through the tremendous amounts of offerings from TED.  The 3D sphere allows for navigation from either outside or inside, and presents videos based on semantic relevance and compatibility.

The We Feel Fine tool provides a visual representation of the overall feelings of the the blogosphere at any given time.  Users can filter results based on age, location, sex, weather, and many others.  We Feel Fine isn’t just limited to one presentation either, but provides users with sex different options: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.  Each of these unique visualization provide a different portrait of real-time events.

After playing around with close to 50 online data visualizers, there were the 10 that struck me the most.  Naturally, I didn’t list them all, but something tells me there are probably even a few that I missed.  What’s important to you in data visualization?  What are some of your favorites?  Let me know in the comments below.