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I’m a big fan of the TED talks, the conferences which started by covering Technology, Entertainment and Design, and now include a huge range of thought-leaders on a variety of topics. (More about TED here)

Somehow I hadn’t got around to watching the talk by Evan Williams from Twitter until I saw a good article about it by Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen.

One interesting point is how Evan has followed a couple of hunches to build projects – Blogger and Twitter.

Secondly – Twitter was designed as a broadcast medium – one message went out to many.

But users invented the @reply functionality, the API, the use of hashtags, and started using it to raise awareness around issues, raise money for causes, implement marketing and business use, etc.

It’s a pretty quick presentation at just 8 minutes – and worth watching until the end to see what happens when TED Curator Chris Anderson uses Twitter search to look for mentions of Evan Williams.

I’m not a regular Telegraph reader, so I may have missed something, but the website has an article today with a short bio of the Twitter trio of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone.

But nothing else. No story about Twitter, no story about online business, microblogging, or even bios that you couldn’t find on Wikipedia or elsewhere. Just links to their Twitter accounts and 3-4 paragraphs on each.

How odd, and rather pointless. Feel free to witness it for yourself.

In case you haven’t caught the new, Evan Williams is replacing Jack Dorsey as CEO of Twitter, with Dorsey now stepping into the role of Chairman.

The full explanation and announcement is on the Twitter blog.

It certainly seems to be in line with a new drive towards monetisation, possibly triggered by the financial crisis?