AS some of the greatest thinking on earth descends on Scotland’s capital city this week at the TEDGlobal 2011 conference, help is at hand for all those feeling wholly inadequate in the presence of such heavy-hitting intellectualism.
With a line-up of speaker profiles such as ‘privacy artist’, ‘digital preservationist’, ‘rational optimist’, ‘evolutionary biologist’, ‘underworld investigator’ and ‘debunker’, the four day event in Edinburgh is expected to deliver a series of fascinating and inspirational lectures mooting questions such as What is life? And how can it be better lived?
In celebration of the genius arriving in their home city, and in an attempt to enable the mediocre to become magnificent, a team of competent underachievers at digital agency, Blonde, has developed TED Yourself – an application which allows absolutely anyone to become intellectually superior in an instant.
TED Yourself is a low-friction application that allows users to login with their LinkedIn account and create a spoof TED profile with a single click.
TED Yourself pulls in the user’s profile picture and summary via the LinkedIn API, giving them a randomly generated TED-style, two-word job description and adds a paragraph of pseudo-intellectual double-speak to their biography.
Superiority facilitator, Phil Adams, from TED Yourself, surmises: “Squaring your I.Q by the length of your job title, Ted Yourself lets you experience what making a profound contribution to the human race feels like without actually having to lift a philanthropic finger. It’s the fastest way to intellectual superiority.”
Recent ‘TEDologists’ include a Chemosurgical Inquisitor, a Global Intimidator and an Immunological Millennialist. Try it for yourself at: http://tedyourself.com/
The application also assigns an ANTOA (Another Number to Obsess About) score to each TED Yourself profile – a knowing nod to this audience’s preoccupation with social media statistics such as number of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Klout score etc.
Notes to editors:
- TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate ‘ideas worth spreading’.
- The TEDGlobal 2011 conference is in Edinburgh from 11th July and runs over four days, with 50-plus speakers and performers from all over the world. Find out more at: http://conferences.ted.com/TEDGlobal2011/ and http://conferences.ted.com/TEDGlobal2011/program/speakers.php.
- TED Yourself was built by Edinburgh-based digital agency, Blonde, as open source in nodejs utilising CouchDB as a database www.blonde.net
For more information, contact Emma Pollock at Stripe Communications on 0131 561 8635.
MEDIA RELEASE posted by Stripe Communications. You too can post media releases (aka press releases) on allmediascotland.com. For more information, email here.
Contact: Emma Pollock
Phone: 0131 561 8626
Email: emma.pollock@stripecom.co.uk
Website: http://www.blonde.net
