I have been a fan of the Ignite events ever since I saw the Ignite talk about fighting dirty at Scrabble. A focused topic, an enthusiastic speaker, a couple handfuls of slides, and five minutes, and you’ve got some fascinating presentations.

Recently O’Reilly Media launched a new portal for getting all the Ignite videos together in one place. Ignite Show Video, at http://igniteshow.com, currently has around 440 videos from past Ignite events but plenty more are to come.

I did a quick search for scrabble and to my surprise the video was not only there it was there twice; it looks like two people listed it (what from its description appears to be the same video was put up on January 29 and March 3.) I did another search, this time for Apple, and got five results — four videos (none duplicates) and one speaker bio. Search results include brief snippets about the video, the venue (though some are marked “anonymous”) and date and time. Each video has its own page with statistics on views and thumbs-up and thumbs-down counts, and with tools to share on Facebook or embed the video on your own Web site.

When I tried doing searches I was a little disappointed at how few results I got for some searches, so if you don’t find what you’re looking for you might want to try browsing the collection’s tags at http://igniteshow.com/browse/tags. (Be sure to do both, though; searching for Apple found four videos, but I found only one video with the Apple tag.) If you want to just get an idea of what kind of talks are available, you can browse the most popular videos or check out the latest.

If you’ve got five minutes and you’d like a little inspiration, check out this collection. Hey O’Reilly Media, how about a “random” function?