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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).

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.

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