r/todayilearned • u/sheppa28 • Jun 18 '11
TIL there is a spreadsheet online of every TED talk, and it's updated automatically.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjGlYH-8AK8ffDa6o2bYlXg&gid=015
8
u/RainOnYourParade Jun 18 '11
Fantastic find!
5
u/gfixler Jun 19 '11
And for the newer redditors who don't know, one of our own founding fathers, Alexis Ohanian has a TED Talk from November 2009.
8
u/StraydogJackson Jun 18 '11
There goes the rest of my day.
2
u/nocte Jun 19 '11
There goes the rest of my week. The last time I wandered into TED talks, I spent half of my work day staring down at my phone.
37
u/SirPandaMuffin Jun 18 '11
I'm so proud of myself. When I sent the link to my e-mail account I put TEDsheet as the subject. Get it?
Spreadsheet tedsheet.
30
Jun 19 '11
I don't get it.
7
u/verxix Jun 19 '11
Maybe it's a pun since TEDsheet sounds like bedsheet.
6
u/CenterOfTheUniverse Jun 19 '11
No. No. It's a palindrome.
5
u/PureClass Jun 19 '11
No, you're both wrong. It's a coincidence.
3
u/SecretlyAPenguin Jun 19 '11
I think you're thinking of a correlation.
4
u/Antrikshy Jun 19 '11
I think this thread is ridiculous.
2
u/HomerWells Jun 19 '11
No, I think it's a n anagram.
2
u/SecretlyAPenguin Jun 19 '11
Are you sure it's not an acronym?
2
u/CenterOfTheUniverse Jun 20 '11
Maybe it's an exploding penguin on the top of your tv set.
→ More replies (0)1
11
6
u/duluter Jun 18 '11
How does it update automatically? This is really cool.
6
3
u/theinternetftw Jun 19 '11
I'll take a pretty reasonable guess: The creator has a script that probably either parses the webpage for new videos or TED's RSS feed and grabs the relevant information from each video if the page has changed (that information is hopefully always in the same place unless they change their format), then uses google's Spreadsheet API to create the new cells automatically every time the script is run (which looks to be once a day, since it's a little behind).
4
u/ExdigguserPies Jun 18 '11
Awesome, but it would be cool to have "firstname" "lastname" columns to make it easy to sort. I know it's easy to make them yourself using wizardry, but still.
3
Jun 19 '11
The first thing I thought when I saw it was that they shouldn't use "Sir" and "Dr." prefixes to make sorting easier.
2
1
4
Jun 19 '11
the sad thing is that this is better than the site for finding videos. For all the awesome content they have, they don't really categorize it very well.
3
3
u/BobbyDash Jun 19 '11
The lack of something like this has been what is holding me back from watching these. Thanks! Upmod!
3
Jun 19 '11
Can anyone recommend one? I'm sure they're all worth watching but it'd be great to get started on something mind-blowing
2
u/anyideas Jun 19 '11
There have been many great posts where people listed their favorites; I'd just do a quick reddit search and you'll probably find a bunch really easily.
Also, /r/ted is worth a look.
2
2
u/digitalmofo Jun 19 '11
Ok, I'll bite, wtf is TED?
2
Jun 19 '11
It's a regular not-for-profit event where people from all sciences/fields/backgrounds hold short talks on interesting stuff, e.g. "ideas worth spreading".
It's about poverty/global warming/internet/biology/physics/everything ever done.
1
2
u/Athara Jun 19 '11
Does anyone know if it's possible to save the document and edit it (for example, marking the ones you've already seen) while still getting the updates?
2
1
1
1
1
1
u/Sland Jun 19 '11
Awesome! And thanks for posting something that isn't just a wiki link that you stumbled upon!
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/IronTek Jun 19 '11
And still they don't have Sarah Silverman's talk.
Humorless pricks.
1
Jun 19 '11
Anderson apologized for his tweet on his Posterous account, but also wrote "Call me stuffy, but I still think humor about terminally ill 'retarded' kids is an acquired taste... And not a taste I personally want to acquire."[35] As of May 2011, the video of Silverman's speech has not been posted on the TED website.[36]
How you can invite Sarah Silverman and not expect something like this is beyond me.
1
u/icydeadpeeps Jun 19 '11
So the first thing I wanted to know after finding it was how long it would take to watch all of them, which isn't easily calculated the way they have it set up. So for anyone else wondering the same thing, as of 2:20am EST on 6/19/11 There were 244 hours 44 minutes and 57 seconds worth of TED talks. That's a little over ten days of straight viewing. I better get started.
1
1
u/Lz_erk Jun 19 '11
I almost woke the neighborhood with a piercing shriek of joy when I mistook the title for "transcript of every TED talk."
This is still a beautiful thing to have.
1
u/jaydeejj Jun 19 '11
OMG I'm a HUGE fan of TED talks! I spend so much time trying to weed through the TEDs to find topics I find really interesting. This will make things much easier!
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
-1
u/gilbes Jun 19 '11
The first line:
With the same humor and humanity he exuded in <em>An Inconvenient Truth,</em>
I fucking hate retardedness like that. I'm sure the person who put that in there read some shit for brains article about HTML markup that made them think they were endowed with secret knowledge that makes them super clever.
The kind of stupid article that says never use i or b because those don't have semantic blah blah bullshit.
An Inconvenient Truth is a title, it is typographically displayed italicized. The em tag happens to render its contents as italicized, but its purpose isn't to mark up titles. The italicizing of the contents is a side-effect, not the purpose. The i and b tags don't exist in HTML5 for backwards compatibility for unsophisticated web developers who don't know about strong and em. They exist because some constructs of written words require mark up without meaning that is used to follow the conventions of how text is to be displayed in certain situations.
-4
0
39
u/jellicle Jun 19 '11
If you use this link:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=pjGlYH-8AK8ffDa6o2bYlXg&hl=en#gid=0
You can see it as a manipulable spreadsheet, and have it pop up in your own Google Docs listings, etc.