TED’s Great Adventure

From March 7th to the 10th, Monterey, California, will become a gathering place for some of the greatest minds on the planet. These dates mark the talks, discussions, and presentations that will comprise TED 2007, a conference which focuses on bringing together innovative and influential people from the technology, entertainment, and design sectors to see how best they can solve the worlds ills.

The reason we mention TED on Profy isn’t solely because it’s a great four days out of the year from which a lot of interesting, effective things result. We bring it up because TED is planning to get more social with the world. Which, you know, is something that we like. A lot.

The plan is to create a social network intended to connect do-gooders and world changers together. Yes, this broad “clique” already does exist in many different forms and forums, but TED wants to tie them into the conference rather than just have them talk about it on the sidelines in another venue entirely.

Attendees and speakers are also welcome to join the “TED network,” where they’re encouraged to interact with one another as much as possible after the conference lets out on the weekend – until they meet again. They’ll be able to talk to the community at large, and they’ll have access to one another, of course, but we won’t have access to them unless they give the OK, and that’s on a case-by-case basis. The rules will probably loosen up a bit over time (don’t quote us on that), but precautions are precautions. This measure to ensure members’ privacy in both “echelons” is understandable. It keeps rabid “fans” from populating their inboxes with greetings. The same goes for the hate mail.

The main purpose of the network is to expand the 1,000 or so that attend in California and Tanzania every year (a biennial TED Global (June 4-7, 2007) was begun as well, and is hosted at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro) to include millions of observers in the “conversation”. It’s so that people who couldn’t quite scrape together several thousand dollars for access – and if they could afford it, weren’t able to whip cash from pocket quickly enough – aren’t left to read magazine pieces on the event. They won’t have to go elsewhere to find their own special TED gangs.

Watching TED with your own eyes

Last year’s TED marked the first serious consideration by conference organizers to deliver video documentation of a select number of events at TED. TED Talks is what they came up with, and the videos’ popularity was astonishing. To this day, recorded talks have been watched 5.5 million times by roughly 2 million people. This year, the videographers intend to capture many more items on this week’s agenda.

TED isn’t without a sizeable amount of funding, and organizers originally wished that its “talks” would be broadcast by a major network; they presumed the BBC to be the best potential partner for the project. But no one took much interest in the “product”. Thus TED decided to go it alone and feed the public’s appetite directly from the conference floor – or…its servers.

Humanitarianism is still cool this year, so TED 2007 is really a continuation on last year’s theme, but we’re sure somewhere along the line we’ll hear geeks talk tech and wax on about the changing Internet landscape, primarily Web 2.0. (Keep those fingers crossed.)

You can count on the brush strokes to be broad, however. TED is definitely more along the lines of a Doha round where things actually get done or a G8 summit absent the over-saturation of politicians than a conference where laptops are more populous than purses (actually, we might be wrong there) and everyone kneels in the direction of Silicon Valley. There may be a few people from Capitol Hill, the EU, or the AU there this year (Bill Clinton will receive a TED award) but they’ll just be sprinkles among the 1,000 or so scientists, intellectuals, theorists, and techies to be in attendance.