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TED ranks as prob­a­bly the great­est show­case of col­lec­tive smart think­ing on the planet. It’s held in Mon­terey, Cal­i­for­nia every year and attracts some of the world’s most inter­est­ing thinkers and speak­ers. The 2007 TED is immi­nent and fea­tures the likes of Bill Clin­ton, Edward deBono, Lawrence Lessig, Paul Simon, Philippe Starck, Richard Bran­son – the list goes on and on.

I would love to go but the time, dis­tance and con­sid­er­able expense kind of rule it out. How­ever, as the next best thing, you can see many of the pre­vi­ous years’ pre­sen­ta­tions here. Warn­ing though: this is a pro­duc­tiv­ity black hole – I’ve spent some seri­ous time in the last week check­ing these out (I’ll put it down to train­ing).

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This is a rather lovely piece of film.

Pro­fes­sor Michael Wesch (who’s Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Cul­tural Anthro­pol­ogy at Kansas State Uni­ver­sity) has put together a four and a half minute piece trac­ing the path from text on paper through hypertext/HTML and on to XML in a really charm­ing and engag­ing way. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy about being in tech.

Source: Another plan­ning blog

Read any qual­ity news­pa­per (and quite a few blogs) and you’ll see lamen­ta­tions about the cur­rent state of pol­i­tics. So the com­men­tary goes: we are becom­ing nations of apa­thetic sub­jects who are largely dis­con­nected from the polit­i­cal process. The activism of ear­lier times has gone, they say, no one is putting flow­ers in the bar­rels of rifles any more. The influ­ence of spe­cial inter­est groups (and their per­sua­sive bucket-loads of cash) is added in as a fur­ther exam­ple of a sys­tem skewed against the aver­age cit­i­zen.

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