I found the Ted talks assigned for this week exceptionally
interesting. First of all, the Ted talk with Jimmy Wales about the birth of
Wikipedia was enlightening. It was cool to hear from the actual founder of a
site that is an online encyclopedia that the entire world uses all the time
without thinking about where it came from. It is a nonprofit I’m sure we all
know. The only paid employee was the leader of the software development team.
It was crazy to hear that they pay 5,000 dollars a month to keep the site
running and that the organization is predominately made up of volunteers. I
like how Wales says that the idea behind Wikipedia was to have a “crowd”
working together to produce free, accessible information on the web. It was
interesting to know that there are constantly teams of editors on the look out
for inaccurate information that may have been edited in Wikipedia because I
have wondered about how they control that. Another talk I found interesting was
Kevin Allocca’s on how videos go viral.
As YouTube’s trends manager he is paid to analyze which videos gain the
most views and why. He came to the conclusion that a few things contribute to
why videos go viral: unexpectedness, communities of participation, and
tastemakers. Essentially the unexpectedness of things get more views that
something you might see all the time and are not surprised by. If you don’t see
something coming you are more likely to be amused and more likely to share it.
In addition the power of communication can make a big difference. And lastly, tastemakers
help to spread videos. A tastemaker can just be one person with the power to
make everyone else interested in something. I really liked seeing the other
side of the things I use on the web daily.
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