译者 晶美绝伦Fery
The annual TED conference, held last weekend, used to be a small, exclusive, intimate affair in Monterey California. But it just moved to be a much larger event in Long Beach. It is pricey to attend and, no, I didn't actually do so. But TED's history tells us much about how publishing has changed.
上周末，在美国蒙特利市加利福尼亚州举办了一年一度的TED会议。TED会议在以前一直是以小型的，排外的，私人会议为特点的。但是这次会议组织者在美国长滩举办了一次更大的会议。通常大家认为对与会者来说，这是一次昂贵的会议，但是，我不这样认为。TED的发展史告诉我们太多关于出版是如何改变的内容。
TED — that's short for Technology, Entertainment, and Design — was founded by Richard Saul Wurman in 1984 to gather together interesting people to give great talks about great ideas. The closed TED event attracted many influential, or soon-to-be-influential speakers. To be invited to give a talk at TED was to be exposed to the very influential. Conferences like that have existed forever, and TED's organizers turned out to be very good at it.
TED——是“Technology（科技）, Entertainment（娱乐）, and Design（设计）”三个词的缩写。1984年TED由理查德·索尔·温曼创建，他组织一些杰出人物做一些有关杰出理念的杰出演讲。在当时，刚刚结束的TED会议，吸引了很多有影响的或者将会有影响的演讲者。被邀请去TED做演讲意味着会与很多有影响的大人物认识。像这样的会议其实一直都有，但是TED的组织者却非常擅长经营这样的会议。
But real the story of TED is what happened next. A few years back, TED curator Chris Anderson started putting TED talks up on the net, free. He took a bet that TED would become more attractive as if its published works were widely exposed and shared than it would if they were locked down. That change turned the actual conference into a "premium" offering (where you could see the talks live and interact with participants) compared with TED on the web, which was free for all. This move enhanced the status of TED and served as a bonus to the TED speakers. They could now benefit from exclusivity — few were invited to give TED talks — and from massive exposure. Steve Levy writes about what that exposure now means for those who want to be influential. Making TED a shared experience only enhanced the value of the more exclusive experience.
然而TED的现实故事就是接下来要发生的。几年之前，TED的管理者克里斯·安德森开始吧TED的演讲视频免费发布到网上。他打赌说：如果把TED的演讲作品都公开发布出去与大家分享的话，会比锁在家里自己分享更好，会使TED更具魅力。与互联网上的TED会议相比，这一改变将这一现实中的会议变成了一项额外的收益（在这里你可以看现场演讲直播并与参与者互动），这是对所有人免费的。这一举措提高了TED的地位，并且成为演讲者的红利。演讲者们可以从TED的排他性里获得益处——很少有人能被邀请去TED做演讲——并从其大量的曝光率上获益。苏福克郡长李维写到：这些曝光率是对那些想要成名的人而言。把TED做成一个共享的经验会大大提高其专业性的价值。
Anderson did not stop there. He opened up not only the TED talks themselves but the TED name. TEDx are events that can be put on by pretty much anyone. You need a license and have to do a good job (there's no automatic renewal of the license), but nearly anyone can pitch in. This is literally a freeing up of the concept "ideas worth spreading" to allow anyone to select what those ideas are. So long as you follow a few simple rules — a talk format, some video, and no ads or other commercial tags — you can host a TEDx event. And there are now hundreds of these each year. What is more, TED regularly features talks from these on the site, so they act as feeder for TED publishing.
安德森并没有就此停止。他不仅创建了TED演讲本身，还包括TED这个名字。TEDx是任何人都可以上传演讲视频的项目。你需要有一个许可，而且得操作熟练（这一许可没有自动恢复功能），但是它并不太难，几乎任何人都能完成。照字面上来说，这是一个空白的概念“思想值得传播”，可以让任何人去选择那些思想是什么。只要你遵守一些简单的规则，——演讲格式，一些视频，不能有广告和其他商业标签——你可以主持一场TEDx活动。这些年来，上传的TEDX演讲视频有几百个了。而且，TED定期会从里面选出优秀的演讲者参与其现场会议，因此他们也作为TED发行的原料供给者。
TED has become a publisher (curating content and disseminating it) and a publishing platform (a format designed to attract and disseminate more content). The platform is akin to other new forms of publishing such as blogs or tweets. A TED talk is something that can be described and that gives it informational power.
TED已经变成一个发行者（组织和传播演讲）和一个发行平台（一个以吸引和传播思想为设计目的的方式）。这一平台与其他新型发布形式如博客、推特相似。一场TED演讲就是一种可以描述出来并被赋予新闻力量的思想。
TED could have done the traditional publishing thing — put up walls and sold exclusivity. Instead, it has chosen to embrace the notion that information has the most value when it is shared widely. Perhaps traditional publishers of other forms of media should take note.
TED可以选择做传统发行事务——建立起高墙并出售其专有性。相反，它选择包容具有最大价值的信息理念，与全世界的人分享。或许，其他形式媒体的传统出版商应该注意这一点。
