A Few Good Channels

Now that Miro 1.0 is out, I thought I’d share a few excellent video “channels” I’ve been watching lately - TED Talks, Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU, Pop!Tech, and Ask a Ninja!. Between them all, they may just get you through the writer’s strike.

(To subscribe to any of these in Miro, you can just use the “Add Channel” command in the Channel Menu and put in the RSS url below. Be sure to look at whether you want to download ALL the videos in that feed or just NEW videos added.

TED Talks

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference in Monterey California which “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).”

They now make a huge variety of talks from the conference (current and past) available for syndication in video format. (They also encourage users to share talks - including embedding videos as well as enabling download to desktop without any nasty DRM).

The only real challenge with TED Talks (as the videos are called) is where you want to subscribe to them:

• The “official” feed at the TED site: http://www.ted.com/talks/rss
• The Feedburner TEDTalks_video channel: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TEDTalks_video
• The Feedburner Ideas Worth Spreading feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ideasworthspreading

Any way that you get them, these are fascinating commute sized snippets of high energy brain food, all directed at challenging preconceived notions of all kinds. Many are deliberately provocative.

Recent favorites include Lawrence Lessig on Copyright Law and Erin McKean on Redefining the Dictionary.

Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU

As you might expect, given their reputation for attracting and retaining top quality, imaginative engineering talent and for supporting diverse approaches to innovation, lots and lots of good speakers come to Google.

Two series in particular I’m fond of are the Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU. Neither of these has a feed of it’s own per se, they are just search results on Google Video for the appropriate tags, served as an RSS feed:

• Google Tech Talks: http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=Google+%22Google+Tech+Talks%22″>
  +duration=long&so=1&num=30&output=rss
• Google engEDU: http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=Google+engEDU&so=0&num=20&output=rss

Again there are a TON of interesting videos - don’t set yourself any expectation of watching them all, but cherry pick from the stream passing by.

Pop! Tech Popcasts

This one stretches the definitiion of favorite since it is brand new, but the initial set of videos is compelling. Pop!Tech is a conference on “The Impact of Technology on People.”

This year they also created Pop!Casts, which are also creative commons licensed, and availble in audio or video formats.

• Popcasts Audio Feed: http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/rss/popcasts_audio_rss.xml
• Popcasts Video feed: http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/rss/popcasts_video_rss.xml

Initial videos on their list include Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, and Jason Moran - and intriguing mix.

With all this great content available, there’s no excuse for not having an active, ongoing, “continuing education” program of your own. So take the time to feed your brain and your imagination.

Just for fun bonus: Ask a Ninja!: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AskANinja

And my recent favorite, Ninja Poetry: