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But how on earth could he hold his breath under water for 17 minutes? That’s what thousands of people asked themselves when the magician beat his own world record live on the famous Oprah Winfrey TV show. 17 minutes without breathing! Over 1,000 seconds! The truth is, it doesn’t sound humanly possible, but Blaine, who looks just like anybody’s next door neighbour, went out and did it.

David Blaine is a magician who gained worldwide fame for performing his card tricks out in the street. A man capable of stealing your watch while dazzling you with the most amazing sleight of hand. There are hundreds of videos of David Blaine posted on YouTube (and just as many parodying him), but if you want to know how he managed to hold his breath under water so long, just watch the video in which he himself explains his odyssey.

A great talk with an emotive end in which he walks us through the whole twisted process he suffered.

The weird thing about the video, aside from its content, is that it has been subtitled in 17 different languages, has great sound and offers links to other talks given by different magicians presenting their own take on magic. And something even weirder, they’re all posted on a website that doesn’t specialise in magic but nonetheless offers talks by some of the best magicians in the world.

This online plattform is called TED Talks. A free archive of conferences where we can see talks by scientists, designers, artists… up to a total of 800 different experts (to suit whatever your field of interest). One of the fascinating things about TED Talks is the production model: none of the speakers are paid for their talks and the subtitling is done by a team of 3,000 volunteers – the same phenomenon that enabled us to enjoy series like “Lost”, for which we had the subtitles that devoted fans had written themselves.

TED Talks is an engine which creates quality content that eases participation and it shows appreciation for the voluntary work of all who collaborate with it. It’s based on the ultra-traditional format “Speakers’ corner”, and has gained the greatest of international prestige and has hosted talks by people like Al Gore, without receiving any fees whatsoever. And, as you can see for yourselves, the talks are so interesting that there are loads of people who feel they just have to translate them so that people can see them online from any part of the world.

I’m not going to start telling you here about how much the Internet has done to help this sort of collaborative voluntary based initiative proliferate, since for that we have experts like Jimmy Wales, founder of one of the greatest collective inventions of the century, Wikipedia. In his talk on TED, Wales tells us how the free encyclopaedia, put together by thousands of volunteers, works.

Do you wanna to surf through the TED Talks? I promise you’ll find some real jewels. Use this videosphere created by the people at Bestiario. It makes it simple to surf from one video to another, using keywords that link them. Through this tool, I came across this really entertaining talk, by the fashion designer Isaac Mizhari, in which he reveals how he finds the inspiration for his designs and what he does to combat boredom, though my favourite is still the magician, David Blaine’s talk.

Let me know which is your favourite and we’ll start our very own top ten!