TED again

I've been doing some background work on what to do about the live stream of the next TED conferences because I think there would be interest in the library hosting it.  But one of my colleagues sent me this link, and now I hesitate.  The article, while obviously opinion, points out some strange inconsistencies regarding the organization.  For my part, I was not aware that TED existed before its recent rise to Internet glory.  Also, I think that while a case can be made for whether the "censored" talk was good enough to be posted, there is a fair amount of insular, "out-of-touch-ness" in the quoted portions of the article that bothers me.  I'm going to have to do some more investigation before we shell out the fairly steep sum (for us) to buy the right to stream their conferences.

After all, I like the TED talks.  They are often thought-provoking, if only rarely earth-shaking in their topic selection.  It bothers me though that an organization would claim to not be censoring their content when their "permanent" members list includes people fitting exactly the description of the type of person targeted by the censored talk.  The action has that "where there's smoke, there's fire" feel to it.  As a library, we stand for freedom of speech perhaps, these days, more than any other institution in the country.