digitalcitizen

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the emotional world of the Web. With deep compassion for the human condition, his projects troll the Internet to find out what we're all feeling and looking for.

Artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris makes online art that captures the world's expression -- and gives us a glimpse of the soul of the Internet.

This is the most mind blowing video I have yet seen on TED.com, though I see he has another one following the next year. Have a look at his bio, and try t

The founding mother of the blog revolution, Movable Type's Mena Trott, talks about the early days of blogging, when she realized that giving regular people the power to share our lives online is the key to building a friendlier, more connected world.

Mena Trott and her husband Ben founded Six Apart in a spare bedroom after the blogging software they developed grew beyond a hobby. With products Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox,…

The title makes it sound like a big picture view, but it is a coll

Rives -- star of the Bravo special "Ironic Iconic America" -- tells a typographical fairy tale that's short and bittersweet.

Storyteller and poet Rives is the star of the new special "Ironic Iconic America."

Cute, and some funny emoticons, but that's about it. Still neat.

Surgeon and writer Sherwin Nuland meditates on the idea of hope -- the desire to become our better selves and make a better world. It's a thoughtful 12 minutes that will help you focus on the road ahead.

A practicing surgeon for three decades, Sherwin Nuland witnessed life and death in every variety. Then he turned to writing, exploring what there is to people beyond just anatomy.

Interesting, but it didn't hugely inspire. Still, some interesting tidbits. About 4 minutes, Vaclav Havel (?) and hope isn't a

In this unmissable look at the magic of comics, Scott McCloud bends the presentation format into a cartoon-like experience, where colorful diversions whiz through childhood fascinations and imagined futures that our eyes can hear and touch.

Scott McCloud is author of Understanding Comics, a comic book about comics. He's an evangelist for comics as a valid literary form (as more than pulp and kids' stuff) and his admiring fans…

Unless you were an ardent comic nut, you'll probably appreciate the value of

In this TED archive video from 1998, paralympic sprinter Aimee Mullins talks about her record-setting career as a runner, and about the amazing carbon-fiber prosthetic legs (then a prototype) that helped her cross the finish line.

A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and activist for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics.

Inspiring with some absolutely hilarious moments at the same time.

My text was from the TED posting. However, I do think the philanthropy world has gotten bland and is siloed like so many other things. Bill's style, oddly enough, is quite open and multi-pronged. Complex solutions for complex problems, if you will. And people can think what they will of him, the wisdom of the masses would have taken him down long ago if he hadn't anything of value to offer. There are a LOT of other people I'd rather not see "change the world", including a lot of the so-called activists today.

Why do societies fail? With lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana, Jared Diamond talks about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it.

This is a brilliant theory that has spawned two books, which should be taught in high school history in place of all the crap taught now. The 18 minute version here is a great introduction to it, but people should still read the books.

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group.

Different cultures have different concepts of what is fair. However, but they still have self-interest at the heart of their attempts to collaborate. It's just self-interest that adds up to more, whereas in the past and according to traditional economics, it was just self-interest.

There are many new way

James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news -- and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy.

The lesson to heed here is not to become like-minded to the network collective. The wisdom of crowds is valid when the individual maintain independence.

The MIT Media Lab's video of Siftables, for more info on those cool little computerized blocks inventor David Merrill talked about in the video previous to this one in my queue.

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce -- and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

This is from an online composition site called Noteflight.com. It is awesome! The music composition abilities is pretty good. You try and see how much you'd pay for software like thisI But the ability to compose sheet music and share this easily as copying some code, then pasting into VodPod and being able to stick it on a blog without Javascript or Facebook and such? Priceless! I LOVE IT!

Oh, the piece was composed when I was in university trying to teach myself piano and creating exercises for myself to

Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues, shares how a discussion about menopause with her friends led to talking about all sorts of sexual acts onstage, waging a global campaign to end violence toward women and finding her own happiness.

Great content and brilliant copywriting!

This video was created for the AARP U@50 video contest and placed second.

IDEO’s David Kelley says that product design has become much less about the hardware and more about the user experience. He shows video of this new, broader approach, including footage from the Prada store in New York.

Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women, creativity, the definition of feminism -- and, of course, passion -- in this talk.

Amy Tan, the writer, gives an inspiring, interesting and funny talk about creativity... with a metaphor to quantum physics, string theory and Chinese lore. Loved it!

Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world's biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them.