In a day and a half over half a million people have watched this talk, at the TED website and on YouTube.
I am so proud of her. Really: I've never been happier than when I watched her get a standing ovation, and watching this video go viral is an absolute joy.
It was hard, sometimes, over the last six weeks, while she worked on her speech. Genuinely rough, sometimes: it was like having a third person in the marriage. There was me, Amanda, and there was Amanda's TED speech, and she was spending a lot more time with her TED speech than she was with me.
Initially I was grumpy and jealous and I felt left out, and then, once I heard her give an early version of the speech, I got caught up in the fun of watching her craft it (and watching her figure out how to get it down to 12 minutes), and toward the end I was loving the process of watching her give her speech to college kids and to our friends and just to me and Anthony, and when I got a cold I even banished her from the house for a few days, because I didn't want her speech being derailed by sickness...
Then we went to TED, and it was all worth it. She went on between Sergei Brin and Larry Lessig and she gave her speech. The people who came up and congratulated her over the next few days were people you've heard of, the ones who make the world different.
And when someone came up to me that afternoon and said "You must be Mr Palmer", I said, Yes, I supposed I must be, and I beamed like a madman.
Watch the speech.
It's called The Art of Asking.
When she was working on it, I thought it was about her Kickstarter, and probably applicable to musicians, but hearing people talk to her about it, and watching it go viral, I realised that it's about so much more than that.
...
(I'm in the UK right now for a couple of days. I've just been the Keynote Speaker at the Cambridge WATERSPRITE Student Film Festival. Today I'm going to be in London with the BlackBerry film crew looking at paper stock and such things for the Calendar of Tales. Tomorrow morning is the NEVERWHERE Radio 4/Radio 4 Extra Press Conference and I get to meet BERNARD CRIBBINS. Proper Blog entry SOON.)
Labels: amanda palmer, art, Asking