Although there are plenty of digital-media-business top dogs here, TED is not explicitly about digital media. In its original incarnation, run by Richard Saul Wurman, and the current version, shepherded by Chris Anderson, the conference is about where technology, entertainment, and design meet, with short talks led by business, scientific, and entertainment celebrities. Here’s a typical TED moment, with me as the butt of the joke: During a break, a dot-com mogul who has moved on to run a venture fund sat next to me on a couch, explaining eruditely the differences between different types of stem cell research. Mid-sentence, he looked past me, got up, and said, “Excuse me, I have to go talk to Forrest Whittaker.” It’s that sort of an event: Nobel Prize winners, Oscar winners, and the rest of us just lucky to be here. Today we heard from the woman in charge of NASA’s Saturn study and basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, among many others. The expert on data visualization, Hans Rosling, concluded his talk by engaging in a little sword-swallowing. I mean that literally.
This is the first TED proper I’ve attended since 2002, and it’s gotten huge over the past half decade: there are roughly 1,200 people here. The first day’s talks, around the topics of looking twice at conventional wisdom and personal epiphanies, used the tools of digital media but didn’t discuss the business. Some here are celebrities: Peter Gabriel, Matt Groening, and Julia Sweeney, among many others are here. Peter Gabriel, I should point out, now looks like he could be Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg’s younger brother.
Tomorrow’s the first full day of panels, with presenters as diverse as VC icon John Doerr, former president Bill Clinton, and musician Paul Simon. I can’t guarantee much digital media news, but I will report back at day’s end, from the point of view of someone listening from the paidContent point of view.