The 10 Best TED Talks of 2011 Watching videos online is usually considered fun, but generally a waste of time. Not so with TED videos, which are uniformly interesting, educational, inspiring, and enjoyable. If you haven't spent much time (or any) checking out TED videos, you should – and to help with that, I've compiled what seem to be the very best 10 TED videos of 2011. It was a grueling task, combing through the cream of the crop on the TED site, but somebody had to do it. Some of the talks may have been filmed prior to 2011 but all of the talks here were posted in 2011. How I Became 100 Artists You don't need to be an artist to appreciate Shea Hembrey's "How I became 100 artists," but if you are it's even more amazing. A Modern Take on Piano, Violin, Cello If music is more your thing, then the "Modern Take on Piano, Violin, Cello" entry from the Ahn Trio is a must-watch (and listen). 3 Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed Learning experiences like this, I could do without. How to Spot a Liar Your Favorites?
Shuu.sh: A Brilliant Data-Viz Idea That Solves Twitter's Biggest Problem | Co.Design Let's not mince words: Twitter, like any and every social network that becomes hugely successful, can be a giant pain in the ass to use sometimes. Now that some of us follow hundreds of people for work and play, it's all too easy to miss stuff in the firehose -- especially when a handful of the folks you follow tweet so often that they push other, more infrequent (but just as valuable) tweets out of sight. Alice Bartlett, the latest addition to BERG's team of design/tech innovators, created a fun solution called Shuu.sh. It analyzes your Twitter feed and visually re-formats it so that infrequent tweeters are displayed in huge type so you don't miss them, while the blabbermouths are shrunk down to near-invisibility. [With Shuu.sh off] [With Shuu.sh On] Why can't Twitter have "volume knobs" for Lists or individuals? The method isn't complicated: Bartlett's code simply assigns a "frequency value" to everyone you follow, from one to eleven. [Try Shuu.sh at BERG]