connecting*the*dots

If you’re an interaction designer, think about the process of generating design personae while listening to Gladwell.

With all of the unconferences popping up on the geek landscape, one has to assume that conference formats outside the technology community will slowly but steadily begin to loosen up a bit.

Thankfully, my favorite conference (TED) is making a move in that direction with TEDTalks.

TED is now releasing their talks, one per-week, under a Creative Commons license, allowing anyone to digest the talks and republish them for non-commercial purposes. I’ve just subscribed to their RSS feed (you can choose between the post, video, audio and email newsletter).

You still have to be invited to attend TED, the price tag remains +$4,000 and the format of the conference itself hasn’t changed, but it’s a great move for them to remove the walls and let us common folk listen in on the happenings.

Thank you.

Conferences often resemble a living, breathing, talking gallery exhibit… with bad food; an expensive, explicit exhibit, which usually fails to inspire me (not as an artist’s juxtaposed take on light and mass might).

That being said, I’d pretty much do anything to make it to the TED conference; the annual gathering of the world’s top philosophers, technologists and intellectuals created by the father of information architecture, Richard Saul Wurman and now run by Chris Anderson.

Well, thanks to Ethan, we can now all sit in on the experience via his live-blogging of this year’s event.

You know, he’s bound to get more than a three minute spot in the future.