Nicholas Negroponte talks about how One Laptop per Child is doing, two years in. Speaking at the EG conference while the first XO laptops roll off the production line, he recaps the controversies and recommits to the goals of this far-reaching project. (Recorded December 2007 in Los Angeles, California. Duration: 20:46.)

Watch Nicholas Negroponte’s 2008 talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances — including Negroponte’s talk at TED2006, just one week after he committed himself fully to One Laptop per Child for the rest of his life; and his eye-opening talk from the very first TED, in 1984, where he makes 5 predictions about the future (and 4 of them are right).

With 50 million views since we debuted online two years ago, TED talks have become a powerful cultural force.

To celebrate this milestone, we’re releasing a never-before-seen list: the Top 10 TED talks of all time, as of June 2008.

With speakers like neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor and global health expert Hans Rosling, the list proves one of the compelling ideas behind TEDTalks: that an unknown speaker with a powerful idea can reach — and move — a global audience. Links to all 10 talks are found below — or browse through our Top 10 TED Talks Theme. Even if you’ve seen all the talks, the highlights video is darn fun.

One more post about conferences. (Except it’s really about any meeting).

Easily overlooked, but incredibly important: the way you arrange the room where people speak.

The venue owner (hotel/convention center) wants something easy. Your boss wants something cheap. You
want something tried and true so you don’t get blamed. The end result?
Mediocrity. Boring sameness. What a wasted opportunity.

In the scheme of things, a great room at a conference is a bargain.
Spending what it takes to make it work has a huge payoff. That said,
here are some thoughts:

“What does this remind me of?”

When I graduated from college and went to work in consulting I was told from the earliest days of my internship to pick something and stick with it. Jack of all trades, master of none, I was told. I had to choose whether I’d be a generalist with a wide breadth of knowledge, or a specialist with deep understanding of a single topic.

Checklists are a great way to ensure things do not slip through the cracks. With my brain being bombarded with so much information and with the need to be productive, I do not trust my memory to remember the right things at the right time. So whether it is grocery shopping or business analysis or marketing, I always work with a checklist.

Here are over twenty high-level items that should be on your marketing check list you might want to use. Expand it to include or exclude items as it suites your business.

Characteristics of a good decision making process:

1. Understand if there is a problem in the first place. A problem occurs current results are misaligned with objectives; or if there is any deviation from the plan.
2. Define the problem. If you can’t define the problem, then you have very little understanding of the problem in the first place. Go back to Step 1.
3. Problem components – break down the problem into parts and identify the various forces at play. Every problem has constraints. Identify them. Perhaps addressing the constraints may change the nature of the problem. If it does, go to Step 2.

Open source and blogging have a lot in common: amateurs, workplaces, bottom-up organization and startups.

Ad: “Hackers & Painters” by Paul Graham

What’s a brand?

I think it is the product of two things:

[Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation].

If I encounter a brand and I don’t know what it means or does, it has zero power. If I have an expectation of what an organization will do for me, but I don’t care about that, no power.

Fedex is a powerful brand because you always get what you expect, and the relief you get from their consistency is high.

I love the idea of collaboration. It’s such an open, positive-sounding term, harmonizing sweetly with concepts like sharing and cooperation. It’s an idealistic term too; when I close my eyes, I imagine a spring meadow filled with people young and old, their hands linked gladly together. It all sounds so nice. And yet…somehow it isn’t quite me.

Maybe I’m a product of the old school, born too late in the Digital Revolution to have absorbed the essential optimism of Web 2.0. I certainly can feel it, but it doesn’t run as deep as an older pattern that I identify with, that of the outsider working against the system. In other words: I miss being a schemer, getting together with my co-conspirators to hatch some new head-exploding idea. Maybe this is a natural reaction from having run in “transparency mode” for so long, letting all my intentions and feelings show as plainly as I can.