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The Best Thing On the Internet Right Now is this amazing video from Hans Rosling called “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes.” I present for a living and I just love how some people use technology to convey huge amounts of information as they present in a way that would have been impossible just a few years ago.

This is from the BBC’s “Joy of Stats,” so there’s a great technical team working on this, but you can, in four minutes, learn what would have taken you hours if you were just reading.  When I present to teachers and information science people, one of the points I like to make is that we tend to romanticize older forms of media and information conveyance - books, primarily - because we grew up with them. But a book is really just a 500-year old piece of information delivering technology. It has limitations. I think that people who wrote all those years ago would have loved to have tech like this at their disposal. Sure, there’s something lovely about letting words and words alone forge a relationship with the reader - but there is something equally lovely about being informed, or moved, or connected to by something greater than words alone. This is a great presentation, but it’s also a great tutorial on how we can present, and for me that’s why it’s the best thing on the Internet right now.

Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four (via BBC)