B1BLOG

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).

It’s an amaz­ingly diverse and eclectic group of speak­ers. One minute you can see cos­mo­lo­gist Mar­tin Rees talk about the uni­verse, the next see Wired’s Kevin Kelly draw par­al­lels between evol­u­tion and tech­no­logy. The many oth­ers include Richard Dawkins, Mal­com Glad­well, Steven Levitt, Nich­olas Negro­pote and Al Gore. Hope­fully the 2007 present­a­tions will become avail­able soon too.

Of course it puts my inferi­or­ity com­plex into over­drive – but that’s a small price to pay.

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.

There are signs, how­ever, that this is chan­ging with the Inter­net being the medium of choice. Of course, this isn’t exactly new. The 2004 US cam­paign for Howard Dean set the stage with its grass roots fund-raising (over $25m) and use of blog­ging among other things.

Now, it’s all moved on again. We have the growth of social net­work­ing and all the other web 2.0 tools. Where as Dean had local level Meetups, now can­did­ates can cre­ate wider net­works, inter­con­nect those net­works and amp­lify their mes­sage even further.

The poster child this time round in the US is Barack Obama. Through his my.barackobama.com site, sup­port­ers can link to his social net­work, cre­ate sub groups of their own and blog their own mes­sages. The over­all first impres­sion is of an inclus­ive cam­paign rather than a me, me, me one.

Hil­lary Clinton’s site by con­trast feels very much an ‘all about Hil­lary’ affair. It doesn’t have the digital out­reach of Obama’s. And neither have quite the pull of some­thing like Rock the Vote which in the last US elec­tion claims to have registered 1.4 mil­lion people to vote.

But what about the UK?

It’s inter­est­ing to con­trast David Cameron’s web­cameron site with Gor­don Brown’s blog. Cameron goes for access­ib­il­ity. Brown goes for states­man­like. Cameron is all video. Brown is text and images. While much of what the parties say is pretty sim­ilar, it’s in the tone and char­ac­ter that the dif­fer­ences are most appar­ent. And as they’re on the web it is all that more imme­di­ate and accessible.

Of course it remains to be seen if whether these efforts will rad­ic­ally affect the out­come of either the US or UK elec­tions. Can the tech­no­logy really help re-engage people into the pro­cess? Or will it cre­ate altern­at­ive grass roots net­works that place pres­sure on the main polit­ical institutions?

Per­son­ally, I’m optim­istic. The access­ib­il­ity of the web, its ease of inter­ac­tion and cul­ture of speak­ing your mind (for good and bad) can only help cre­ate and sus­tain debate.