50 million TEDTalks

TED.com, the site of the TED conferences, has just past a major milestone: in the two years after its inception, it has "served" 50 million videos of speeches from TED and from partner conferences. Undoubtedly, as the TED blog says, TEDTalks have become a cultural force and a powerful platform for sharing ideas that matter (changing, in some cases, the speaker's lives: just read this NYTimes story about Jill Bolte Taylor, or this Time entry about Jeff Han -- the "presentation" mentioned was his TEDTalk).

Here are the top 10 TEDTalks so far (there are about 300 more on the TED site, for watching and downloading for free) and, below, a video with highlights of the same talks:

1. Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
2. Jeff Han: Touchscreen demo foreshadows the iPhone
3. David Gallo: Underwater astonishments
4. Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo
5. Arthur Benjamin: Lightning calculation and other "Mathemagic"
6. Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
7. Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen
8. Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better
9. Al Gore: 15 ways to avert a climate crisis
10. Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote

Even if you've seen all these talks, this highlights video is well worth a watch.