“Off and on” over the last couple of weeks I have been filling in my free time viewing inspiring talks from the annual TED Conference on the web.  The presentations are less than 20 minutes long and cover the wide range of topics which have been delivered during this invitation-only conference since 2006.  (The conference itself has been held for 25 years but, it was only in 2006 that the TED.com website was created to expand the audience.)  So, now you do not have to be a Bill Gates, Nicholas Negroponte, Rupert Murdoch, Jeffrey Katzenberg (or, one of the other 1,000 notable attendees) to gain useful insight and motivation from this forum where big thinkers are tackling big ideas. 

I was prompted to check out the TED.com website after I met up with a friend of mine for dinner a couple of weeks ago that had flown in from the East Coast to attend the conference (now being held in Long Beach after they outgrew the previous Monterey, California location).  What I found was an easy to use website that currently has 388 videos posted which cover the official topics of “technology, entertainment, design” that have been sub-categorized by some 200+ tags.  A more leisurely way to browse the content is either by sorting the content in a variety of interesting grouping (e.g. most…emailed, discussed, favored, jaw-dropping, persuasive, courageous, ingenious, fascinating, inspiring, etc.) or; you can peruse via themes such as “tales of innovation”, “inspired by nature”, “to boldly go…”, “what’s next in tech”, “design like you give a damn”, “evolution’s genius”, and 30 other themes.   What I also found pleasantly surprising was the large number of truly interesting comments that have been posted on each of the videos which often provide additional sources of information and perspectives on the topic.

I will not try to report on all of the aspects of the TED non-profit in this post but, I will encourage you to try out the TED.com site and see if it becomes as addictive to you as YouTube has become for web surfers of all generations.

(FYI, beyond the TED Conference there are TED related effort which include TED Global, TED Prize, TED Talks, TED Fellows, TED Blog, and now a TED translation project which “aims to tap into the skills of the global TED community in a crowd-sourcing effort to translate the most inspiring talks into the world's myriad of languages”.)

On a separate note…when creating the title of this post I struggled with trying to find a catchier term for “innovation seekers” so; I was hoping that some creative journalist had coined some attention-grabbing term along the lines of the digerati, glitterati, literati or even the Technorati.  But, obviously I have not yet found any such label yet for the scholars of innovation.