There was a time when TED talks were mostly academics squeezing their usual hour long presentation into 20 minutes by simply talking really really fast. Those were fun.

After the first couple of ones that were public and on the internet, the usual self-promoting psychobabble-spouting androids moved in and now it's entirely worthless. Someone spins 30 seconds worth of insight out for half an hour, and you still somehow feel stupider when you've finished watching it.

In one of the recent Gladwell threads, someone on here coined the phrase "insight porn". TED is basically insight dogging.

EDIT: to be fair, if TED is insight dogging, this place is a sticky floored insight dungeon in some godforsaken soho basement...

Hi, organizer of one of Europe's largest TEDx events here.

First of all, as others mentioned, TEDx events are independently organized. There are over 3000 of them in the world and obviously quality varies greatly. Getting a TEDx license is pretty trivial and there is no real oversight on quality. Yet, there are some great videos out there.

Second, nobody pretends TED is an academic conference. I see a TED talk as the blurb on the back cover of a book. The speaker's job is to pique your interest in a topic during that 18 minutes. Pique it enough that you'll go on and research the topic in greater detail. Nobody expects to be a master in anything after sitting in a chair for 18 minutes. But if you've never thought about a problem, 18 minutes may push you to do it. And it's true some talks are mostly inspirational, with little informative value - we usually put a couple in the lineup as a breather.

Third, TED is about cross-pollination of ideas. You hear an idea in neuroscience and it inspires you to do something in CS. Happens all the time. You will not act on 99% of the information you learn (be it in news, books, internet, HN) anyways, but it does expand your horizons.

Lastly, TED's biggest value is in developing countries. If you live in NYC or SF, there are dozens of conferences you can attend every week. So the marginal benefit of going to a TED event is little. However, TED as a brand is really well known in developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe (like mine), inhabited by few, if any, world class innovators. In those countries, people do find TED really inspirational and often the local TEDx events are one of the very few decent conferences you can attend.

If you haven't seen The Onion's[1] Onion Talks and want a good satirical criticism of TED, I highly recommend them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q

(There are more if you want to find them, I didn't want to pollute commentspace with too many links)

[1] The Onion is a satire newspaper, one of the first newspapers to heavily adopt an online format. They just killed their print edition for good last year.

For European HNers (or travelers) I plea for you to use the night trains, keep them alive.

One example: Between Amsterdam & Bern - Skybus flies for €86 (1.5 hours) and the CityNightLine train is €80 for a bed (11.5 hours). Other routes are comparable, you can pay a bit more for your own (non-shared) compartment.

Economically it seems crazy to take these night trains, and I never even bothered until a recent business trip from Amsterdam to Munich.

It was great for many of the reasons mentioned in the article and other comments here: leave and arrive in the city center, no security, no gate closing time, no baggage restrictions/pick-up/lost luggage, have a beer or dinner on board at a real bar or table, use your laptop/phone/ereader whenever you like, lie down, take a shower, whatever. Basically it's like flying the night before with a free (albeit basic) hotel stay thrown in.

I'm worried that too many people dismiss the night trains too easily (like I did), and that these will be relegated to the history books. In my opinion that would really be a tragedy.

Plane travel has turned into a elementary school bus trip. The train is still a grown-up alternative.