One of the benefits of aggregating tens of millions of engagement events every day is that it gives us here at PostRank ranking data that is applicable to virtually any resource on the web. Blog posts, PDF files, videos — you name it, we’ve got it!
Update (March, 2011): We launched ted.postrank.com – check it out!
As a result, we’re always running fun internal experiments to satisfy our own curiosity. And so it happens that, after watching the “Lies, damned lies and statistics” TED talk by Sebastian Wernicke (which, as data geeks here at PostRank, we totally loved), we decided to run a quick experiment to determine what the most engaging TED talk is. We also wanted to know if the talks are consistent, or if they vary among different social networks. (And with over 250 million views under their collective belt, TED has a lot of engagement data.)
You can see the results for yourself, as well as play with the data: Google spreadsheet with 766 ranked TED talks. (Or download the spreadsheet.) Top three talks overall by engagement?
- Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.
- Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps.
- Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology.
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UPDATE: We received an number of requests to update the talks, given that lots of new ones have been added. We’ve included the new spreadsheet link above. Interestingly, the top three talks from before are still the top three, but the talks in the #2 and #3 spots have changed places.
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Perhaps even more interestingly, for the top spots there definitely is some variation among each of the networks. Reddit readers seem to have a science bias, whereas Digg users love to digg visual presentations. So now you can add a few more rules to your TedPad — it helps to know your audience!
Finally, for the curious, and if you would like to experiment with your own data, all it took was 40 lines of Ruby to scrape the TED site, query the PostRank APIs, and create the spreadsheet: