TEDxNEWYORK 6/16/09 Dan Dennett (2009) & guest Robert Leslie

Today's discussion was pretty much pure content as opposed to verbal intercourse but here's a wrap up for you... First, Dennett's talk. It's fun (and short), watch it. Next, we had TED photographer Robert Leslie (his popular photograph, above, taken at TED in Monteray will lead you to one of his websites) as our guest for the hour. Robert Leslie came to be the TED photographer through his regular work with musicians and one in particular who pointed him towards TED Susheela Raman. Robert's photographs are enlightening, sometimes humorous and very comprehensive when it comes to TED- a little peak behind the curtain.

Robert blew past the celebrity and rock-n-roll photographs to give us a brief tour of the US post-election and more broadly, the development of one of China's new cities. And there will be more details on that shortly, but this blog needs posting and emails need replying. More soon--

I'm going to break in with a little new about Twitter for a moment, not because I want to tell a hundred random followers about my breakfast but because of its immediate relevance in the media at the moment.  Namely: what the heck is up with elections in Iran, explained here in painstaking statistical analysis by Nate Silver (he was also fastidious with his hyperlinks, so don't make a superficial pass at his page if you want real insight. 

First, the Twitter Apocalypse happened last Friday (can you say y2k in 140 char or less?), what that actually was, and yes, there's an explanation in quasi-layman's terms for you. I crowd-sourced the explanation using Tweeter (my Facebook/Twitter aggregate) and got an answer or two that helped me well enough. Here's that for you if you want it. 

Next, the reason it came to the fore today is because of the news from Iran being covered so quickly by text messages before an A/P reporter can get to their keyboard. (There's also a conference based on Twitter in town this week, but we didn't dive into that. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, spoke at TED this year about what has become of it too. At any rate: Iran, Twitter, mainstream media, find out what's going on in short form, long form, quickly or slowly, the interwebs are shouting, as are the people.