Now that TED­G­lobal 2009 has drawn to a close and the videos are slowly mak­ing their way online, the lat­est Nature has an edi­to­r­ial on the TED phe­nom­e­non, sug­gest­ing that “those wish­ing to reveal sci­en­tific ideas should learn from the engag­ing style of TED con­fer­ence talks”.

TED suc­ceeds in part because par­tic­i­pants are encour­aged to talk about the unex­pected. […] But per­haps the most crit­i­cal key to suc­cess is the style of the talks. […]

The talks have a strict time limit of 18 min­utes — no inter­ac­tion with the audi­ence, and no ques­tions except the infor­mal ones asked in the extended con­ver­sa­tion breaks. […] For a gen­eral audi­ence, 18 min­utes is plenty for get­ting across con­text and key issues, while still forc­ing each speaker to focus on a mes­sage — whether it be advo­cacy or the cel­e­bra­tion of new knowledge.

There is also a wel­come absence of Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions. Instead there are plenty of images — but pre­cious few pro­fes­sional sci­en­tific dia­grams, which can quickly lose the audience’s atten­tion. This forces speak­ers to craft talks that can engage sophis­ti­cated but sci­en­tif­i­cally untu­tored lis­ten­ers at their level. And it also encour­ages speak­ers to try for a freely flow­ing, relaxed pre­sen­ta­tion style, with­out notes. […]

Sci­en­tists wish­ing to inspire non-scientists should look at a few of these talks online and learn a thing or two.

I would go one fur­ther: non-scientists wish­ing to inspire oth­ers should look to TED to learn a thing or two.