Michelle and I have been watching the TEDTalks for a while now. These are videos of talks given at TED2006, the Technology Entertainment, and Design conference held in Monterey, CA. So far the speakers have been incredibly interesting. I've especially enjoyed a few:

• Al Gore: He's life-like and even charming here. If he'd shown half this much humanity during the campaign, he would have won.
• Tony Robbins: The talk is too short for him to provide any real content, but he's simply a fantastic speaker. His talk a great demonstration of public speaking technique.
• Hans Rosling: This professor of international health does an incredible job of bringing global health data to life. It's worth watching the video just to see the data presentation alone; it really sets a new bar for me on how to present tons of data.
• Jeff Han: He demonstrates a pretty cool multi-touch user interface here. Fun stuff.
• Jennifer Lin: This fourteen year old concert pianist is amazing. The coolest part is that she improvs a concerto at the end from a randomly chosen five note theme (actually picked by Goldie Hawn, who was in the audience.) In aome ways, hers was the most mind-blowing talk to me because her talent is the furthest from mine.
• Joshua Prince-Ramus: He's the architect of the spectacular Seattle Central Library. I love the way he functionally breaks down the tasks and roles the buildings play, consider the limitations, and then recombines the solutions into functional art.

There are a bunch more talks I need to watch. I'm particularly interested to see Jimmy Wales' talk (he's the founder of Wikipedia, my new fascination) and Mena Trott's talk (she's the founder of Six Apart, the company that makes Moveable Type, my blog software.) Steven Levitt (Freakonomics), Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point and Blink), and Nicholas Negroponte (One Laptop Per Child and former Director of the MIT Media Lab) are on my list too.

It's worth checking out. You can get the podcasts through iTunes and the site too.