TED Talks series with his former magazine mogul Chris Anderson has racked up 500 million video views for Web speeches of scientists and technical experts. But, he says, only the beginning of a revolution in education is

A few minutes after Alain de Botton announced a packed auditorium in Edinburgh, that secularism, to learn the teachings of the religion and the reintroduction of the concept of preaching, Chris Anderson, the director of the TED needed to fill a few minutes are required and asked for questions from the floor. "Is Ted a new religion?" Asked someone. "The answer I can," he said quickly. "Absolutely not."

And yet, TED has brought the concept of preaching - 18-minute lectures delivered by absolute experts in their field. Five years ago, when YouTube started, it was assumed to be where you went in cats that looked like Hitler's view, or people falling skateboards, but TED Talks, and his brief reflections on everything from neuroscience to creativity, has just celebrated 500 views on the website. By the end of next year that number is expected to reach one billion. In the month when the News of the World folded, Anderson has shown that there is an enormous and still largely untapped appetite for the latest news from the real world.

But then, as a media magnate to go, he is so far from the chairman of News Corp. than you can imagine themselves to be removed. He founded and made his fortune from not one, but two, media empires - first with Future Publishing, the Bath-based company, which he in the 1980s who founded the appetite for used computer and hobby magazines and later in the USA with Imagine Media, which had at one time 130 titles and 1,500 employees - but he is in many ways the anti-Murdoch. Not least because, apart from anything else, few people have heard of him.

However, as the owner of TED and its self-proclaimed "Curator" he has a kind of global "ideas masterful ". Appearing at a TED conference, as more than 70 speakers have last week, in TEDGlobal in Edinburgh, a transformative effect on an academic career. Have" We make our view of speakers try like rock stars, "says Cohen June, the Director of the TED Talks. For the most part, it succeeds. A talk by Ken Robinson, a fairly obscure figure of everyone 's standards, a Liverpudlian former professor of art education at Warwick University, now has eight million times considered.

Is it a religion, when? Not yet, but it has its rituals - to examine participants in the conferences their cynicism at the door, standing ovation at TED seem, at times, how compelling the tribute acts as spontaneous moments of appreciation - and it 's not far off De Botton 's description of the Catholic Church: "collaborative, multinational, very disciplined and branded". Anderson himself is the child of missionary parents, born in Pakistan and raised in India. He isn 't, he says, "\ an earnest do-gooder", although Bruno Giussani, TED' s European director who programmed TEDGlobal, notes that he hide 't his optimistic nature.

Giussani got his job at TED after sending Anderson an email out of the blue suggesting some speakers. "He wrote back within minutes. It tells you a lot about Chris. He's just very open to new ideas. He takes decisions quickly and he has the courage to do things that others wouldn't," says Giussani.

To give away things like the decision in 2005, the content for free. For what is 's most remarkable thing about TED and its transformation into an international media company, organization, and a global force for the dissemination of knowledge that all this is happening quite by chance. When Anderson bought TED in 2001 on behalf of his non-profit Sapling Foundation, it was more like an elite supper club for the masters of the universe.

It was where Bill Gates came to shoulder with Al Gore and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Grinding, and the annual California conference still to feel that. And it 's not cheap: the 850 participants of the TEDGlobal had paid almost ? 4,000 a pop. But in 2005, Anderson listened to his speakers - people who had talked about Creative Commons and the way the Internet could be a force for good - and he has all conversations online.

"Ted went from 800 every year half a million every day in a shockingly short time," says Anderson. "And instead of destroying the business model, what many people thought, because it essentially 's giving away the crown jewels, it actually increased because more people have heard about it."

Online video, he believes, is the beginning of a revolution. He calls it "crowd-accelerated learning" and his latest initiative, TED Ed is on creating a database of educational resources that can be used in every classroom in the world.

"But thank God hasn 't gone to \ his head," said John Lloyd, the veteran comedy producer of Blackadderand Co-Creator QI , who was in Edinburgh this week. Anderson rang him up in 2005 and asked him if he would speak at the first TEDGlobal.

"Of course I 'd never heard of it, but I liked him immediately, I thought he was brilliant and now TED has to be as comic relief: .. If you get the call, \ They' say no T \. "The old media are in crisis, says Lloyd. "TV just assumed people are stupid, but if s \ all these amazing things are there, \ motivated" out there. Intellectual mobility is where it's at \, instead of social mobility. And in this the power of TED is almost limitless. It 's kicking ass. "