If your facebook and twitter feed is anything like mine, you've run across "RSAnimate" videos more than once over the past few months.

Taken from lectures given at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (let's stick with "RSA" for short!), our ears hear the standard lecture that we would get if we were in the room with the presenter, but our eyes are afforded a wonderful gift: sequential and overlapping illustrations of the topic at hand, synced up with the speech.

Part comic strip and part animation, in a way it's the anti-Powerpoint. Whereas bullet points and random clipart more often serve to distract the listener from the very words the presenter is speaking, the RSAnimate videos illustrate and drive home every sentence and phrase (and sometimes every word) that's said.

If I had to trace a lineage to videos that came before this series, I'd point to Anne Leonard's excellent Story of Stuff. While it's an animation in a much more traditional sense, the basic form & function is the same: make otherwise complex or lengthily-described ideas understandable and meaningful for a large audience, using an adorable and accessible cartoon/stick figure/whiteboard aesthetic.

While this style of video is certainly more time-consuming than plugging your camcorder into iMovie and clicking export, for groups and organizations with the resources to do something like this, soon it will be expected (watch out, TED!).

Here is RSA's latest video, a lecture by theorist and critic Slavoj Zizek on the pitfalls of the "ethical consumerism" trend: