The TED organization (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design) runs an invitation-only conference every year for the famous, brilliant and well connected. I’ve been on the waiting list for a few years. Last I subscribed (iTunes Link) to the TED conference video podcasts and have been enjoying the 20 minute presentations each morning on the tread mill. The conferences have featured such an amazing array of speakers; Bill Clinton, Bono, Rick Warren and many authors, designers, business leaders etc. In April TED launched a new, brilliantly designed website with amazing content.

Here’s some highlights:

• Aubrey de Grey, British researcher on aging, claims he has drawn a roadmap to defeat biological aging.
• Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen
• Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

The site is a great example of using both Flash and browser technology to create a rich experience. The home page features a brilliant Flash based navigation element that allows you to select your view either by visualization or list and drill down by theme. In visualization mode the view presents images that represent topics, as you roll over the images a flyout panel provides a description and list of videos. By default the thumbnail sizes are determined by the most recently updated. You can change that view to size up by ‘ most talks’, ‘ most emailed’, or ‘ most discussed’. As you adjust the visualization the view animates to the new settings.

Once you click down to the video level this page displays a full description of the talk and speaker, and all the social computing features to embed the video, share, email etc.

*Click the images to enlarge

The video player provides a chapter navigation on the scrub bar.

The ratings tool is also quite unique providing the ability to quickly checkbox tags and rate the video which then displays a tag cloud.

Visit TED.com for some inspiration!