It was a grueling task, combing through the cream of the crop on the TED site, but somebody had to do it.

How I Became 100 Artists

You don't need to be an artist to appreciate Shea Hembrey's "How I became 100 artists," but if you are it's even more amazing. Hembrey talks about his experience staging an "international art show" with 100 different artists. That would be daunting, but Hembrey decided to invent the 100 artists and create their biographies, passions, and art himself. A fascinating and inspiring piece.

A Modern Take on Piano, Violin, Cello

If music is more your thing, then the "Modern Take on Piano, Violin, Cello" entry from the Ahn Trio is a must-watch (and listen). The Ahn sisters (Maria, Lucia, and Angella) don't spend much time talking, but you won't be disappointed.

3 Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed

Learning experiences like this, I could do without. But Ric Elias' talk "3 things I learned while my plane crashed, details the experience of being on flight 1549 as it crash-landed in the Hudson River in January 2009.

How to Spot a Liar

If you've ever watched the show Lie to Me, you'll find this talk by Pamela Meyer fascinating. In "how to spot a liar," Meyer explains many of the tell-tale signs of lying and how people are often complicit in choosing to believe a lie.

Next page: More TED goodness

Try Something New for 30 Days

This is the perfect talk to watch as you plan your New Year's resolutions. Google's Matt Cutts talks about how you can break or form a habit by trying something new for 30 days.

"The idea is actually pretty simple. Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. It turns out, 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit – like watching the news – from your life."

Let's Use Video to Reinvent Education

You've probably heard of the Khan Academy, as it's been a big topic on ReadWriteWeb. If you want to get the scoop on how and why it was created, Salman Khan explains in his talk "let's use video to reinvent education." Far from "dehumanizing" education, Khan explains how the video tutorials have helped free up teachers to work with students.

The Hidden Beauty of Pollination

Louie Schwartzberg's message in "the hidden beauty of pollination" isn't just important, the video is beautiful. For this one, I recommend hitting up the talk page and downloading the high-res video. Schwartzberg uses high-speed images taken from his film Wings of Life to tell the story of pollinators like bees, bats, hummingbirds and butterflies.

The Art of Wearable Communication

Kate Hartman's talk about wearable devices is a bit quirky, but very interesting. In "the art of wearable communication, Hartman talks about why bodies matter and how she works with everything from radio transceivers to plastic tubes to make wearable devices.

Next page: Two more to go in the Best 10 Ted Talks of 2011

Haunting Photos of Polar Ice

Odds are, you'll probably never get a chance to see the icebergs around Antarctica. That's a shame, because as Camille Seaman points out in her TED talk, they're really something to see.

This one is short and sweet, and well worth the time to watch.

Cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-Century Cyber Weapon

The Stuxnet worm, and what we've read about it in the media, is scary. But it's even scarier than you might imagine. Ralph Langner explains how they dissected Stuxnet, where Langner believes it was originated, and the implications. Watch "cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-century cyber weapon" and you'll be fascinated and probably a bit horrified.

Your Favorites?

It's worth mentioning that the TED site is exactly the way that conference videos should be posted. The videos are well-shot. Subtitles are available for the videos in not just English, but many other languages.

There's a full, interactive transcript for each video. You can download videos in high quality formats for viewing later on your phone, tablet, computer or television if you have a player that supports MP4. While there are some ads on the site, they're minimal and not very intrusive. Which, by the way, works. Delta was sponsoring the site, and having minimal advertising attracted my attention more than if it were festooned in ads. However, we've embedded the YouTube links here because the TED embeds were a bit sluggish. Do check out the direct links to the TED site as well, though.

So there you have it, our picks for the best 10 Ted videos of the year. Have a favorite talk from 2011 that's not on the list, or a talk from a previous year that RWW readers should know about? Please share it in the comments!

Disruptive creative geniuses and others are now invited to upload to YouTube or Vimeo one minute audition videos for consideration by TED. Selected uploaders will be invited to travel to New York for an in-person audition to present to the world on stage in California. TED says it is looking for "the rich use of technologies, formats and styles to make an impact on an audience." The deadline for submission is in 10 days.

None the less, this seems like a big step to me.

See June Cohen, TED's Executive Producer of Media talk about Radical Openness at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit this summer in New York City. Learn more.

TED Talks are brain stretching, tear-jerking, 18 minute nuggets of emerging wisdom. The new translation project is sponsored by Nokia and uses the awesome volunteer-powered translation service DotSub.

If you speak languages other than English, the rest of the DotSub site is quite worth a visit as well.

So far 306 translations have been completed, hopefully more will be performed soon. Bringing these TED videos to more people around the world is a big win for humanity. It is truly remarkable how TED has gone from a closed gathering for the global elite to becoming far, far more publicly available. Andy Carvin has some more details over at NPR.

Experiencing the conference, which has always been by invitation only, will be much easier too with the new $995 price tag - if you're willing to participate virtually.

Last Friday, TED organizers opened up the Associate Membership Program, offering a virtual front row seat for $995. The annual membership fee includes a Web stream of the Palm Springs and Long Beach conferences, and comes with a variety of other perks including books, CDs, and DVDs.

With 2009 being TED's 25th anniversary, the theme will be "The Great Unveiling." Instead of looking back, everyone on the program will be premiering something: "a thrilling discovery, a revolutionary idea, a powerful invention, a spectacular piece of art, or a first-time performance."

Learn more about the associate membership here, or join the TED community by becoming a member of TED.com(free).

Users can choose from a number of preset animations for their characters, ranging from shaking hands with others, to applauding, crying, etc. By double clicking on certain items in the virtual world, users can also often activate some preset animations such as sitting down on a chair or jumping off a dive board.

Setting the plugin up and creating an avatar is a very simple process. Creating rooms, too, seems quite easy, as you can quickly import a number of templates to get started. Currently, all virtual items for Lively are for free, but chances are that Google will start charging for premium items in the future.

For now, the content in Lively is being created only by Google, though over time, they are planning to allow users to start creating their own content as well.

Rooms can be easily embedded into any webpage and worlds often launch with a basic skeleton of the room within just a few seconds.

Graphically, Lively runs very smooth on our test machine here and the visuals, while not comparable to a modern game, are not too bad either. Interestingly, there is no first-person view available, instead, the world is always seen from a camera perspective the user can control.

One area where Lively could definitely needs some improvement is in how users move their avatars around the rooms. To move an avatar, users basically have to drag them through the room, while most people we have met in Lively have commented that they expected to see a more game-like approach where users use the keyboard to move avatars through the rooms.

Second Life users might find the Lively rooms and the amount of customization they can do to them rather restricted - however, Google's idea seems to be less to create one large virtual world, but to give publishers an opportunity to create their own small virtual world for their readers and visitors.

It's interesting to see Google moving into this space. There have always been rumors that Google might be working on a similar product for Google Earth. As of now, the rooms in Lively are compartmentalized and there is no way to move or communicate from one room to another, but given that this is only a first release, this might (hopefully) change over time.

Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers.

What Bit.ly Does Today

At launch Bit.ly is a relatively sophisticated URL shortener. It uses a cookie to remember the last 15 links you've shortened and displays that history on the home page when you visit. It allows you to set up a custom URL ending for your link. It automatically creates 3 thumbnails for every page you save a link to.

How about these features, though? Bit.ly saves a cached copy forever of every page you shorten a link to, on Amazon's S3 storage (processing is done on EC2, as well, so uptime looks good). Bit.ly also tracks clickthrough numbers and referrers so you can see what kind of traffic your shortcut got and from where. There's a simple API for adding Bit.ly functionality to any other web app (Betaworks affiliated gaming site ImInLikeWithYou already has this live) and all the data, including traffic data and thumbnails, is easily accessible by XML and JSON feeds.

Those are some pretty awesome features but that's only the beginning. A javascript submission bookmarklet and user accounts should be available soon. (Update: Bit.ly just added a simple bookmarklet that will make it easier to use casually.)

The Future of Bit.ly: Semantic and Geo Spatial Analysis

In the background, Bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters! Calais is something we've written about extensively here. Bit.ly will use Calais to determine the general category and specific subjects of all the pages its users create shortcuts to. That information will be freely available to the developer community using XML and JSON APIs as well.

As if that's not a whole lot of awesome already - Bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of all the web pages it collects.

You want to see all the web pages related to the US Presidential election, Barack Obama and Asheville, North Carolina? Or about Technology, Google and The Dalles, Oregon? That will be what Bit.ly delivers if it can build up a substantial database of pages. Once it does, it will open that data up to other developers as well.

Why use a URL shortener to catalog all those pages? Why not? Each shortcut signals a page that's of importance to a real human user and an army of link-senders sounds like a great way to build up that database. Semantic indexing of the web through casual but opt-in and common user activity is a great strategy.

Then we can all share access to that data. We're excited and we hope you'll put Bit.ly to use.

Kaufman got the idea after the Bevy, one of Mophie's most popular products, was designed by the crowd at Macworld using sketch pads and a precursor to the system that evolved into Kluster. The keychain/bottler opener/iPod shuffle case was one of Mophie's best selling products, and it was designed in just 72 hours by a crowd, and launched as a product just 2 months later. Kaufman realized he was potentially onto something.

The Kluster system works by breaking down products into manageable chunks. For each chunk (or "phase"), people submit what are called "sparks." Sparks are proposed solutions for that phase. For each spark, other participants can submit "amps" -- which are improvements to that idea. Users also assign "watts" to sparks and amps they like. Watts work kind of like investments. You accrue points based on participation and other factors, and can invest those points (watts) in ideas you like.

Then an algorithm that takes into account "each user's successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history" goes to work to determine which sparks are the best. Companies interested in using the Kluster system, put up cash prizes that are doled out along the way (at the completion of each phase).

The whole concept is similar to the one behind Derek Powazek's new site, Pixish (our coverage). The main difference is that where Pixish is strictly for design related tasks, Kluster is for anything suited to crowd creation. And at Kluster, the crowd is also being relied upon to pick the best result.

During the TED conference, Kluster is hoping to use their system to create a new product in 72 hours. It will be unveiled on the last day of the conference, March 1 at 8am. Unfortunately, the Kluster site has been having a lot of problems, so getting in to participate might be easier said than done. There are $15,000 in phase prizes up for grabs.

Can lightning strike twice? Or was the Bevy a fluke? Kaufman admitted earlier this month that right now most companies see participation in Kluster as a means of viral marketing to connect with their die hard fans. It will take a few hit products to come out of the Kluster process to prove that it is a viable way for companies to conduct their R&D. Do you think it will work? Let us know in the comments below.