2 websites I'm loving right now

I just became aware of 2 websites. I'd heard of the second one, but never checked it out.

I was reading a photoblog that I often check out, and the guy mentioned this video:



Watch it if you have a few minutes. That video was from ted.com, which is a site for the TED conference. That conference has speakers on a variety of subjects speak for 18 minutes. That is the first site I'm really interested in. It has some good ideas for public speakers to emulate.

The other site I'm liking right now is gapminder.org, which is the site that Hans Rosling(the guy in the video above) created to help communicate statistics to the average person. In the videos on TED, he talks about how important it is to use statistics responsibly, and also the importance of using the animations to make them matter to people, and be more compelling. This is also a good principle for public speaking--relevant communication of important truth that can be overlooked if not presented in a compelling way.