TED

Like Pop!Tech below, TED is a conference of visionary thinkers, whose presentations have been filmed and posted to the web. Do you wish to see artwork that walks on the beach by it self or Peter Gabriel speak about concrete ways to stop torture; see Jan Han demo his amazing touch screen or Jan Chipchase on mobile phones. Poke around and find something delightful.

Make Magazine

Make is a magazine and blog that channels and expresses the desire to make things. Newsweek called Make "geek DIY (do it yourself) porn". There is a store where you can buy things from derby racing kits to DIY motherboards for video games. I recommend the rentable library of instructional videos (from machine lathe operation to painting water colors). There is an annual event called the Maker Faire (which included silliness like a lifesize version of the Mousetrap game using bowling balls instead of marbles and massive fire-breathing robots)

Cool Tools, Street Use, Out of Control

Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired and Whole Earth Review has a collection of web pages called Cool tools full of gear, gadgets and approaches that ate more of my time than I care to admit. A related site is Street Use which includes backyard pulse jets and match box cameras. He also wrote the acclaimed Out of Control, a book about technology, biology, decentralization and self-sustaining systems. (It was also required reading for some of the cast of the Matrix movies.)

Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb

Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world.

Blink by Malcom Gladwell

Blink by Malcolm Gadwell / Gladwell maintains that we "blink" when we think without thinking. We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to our conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than we do with volumes of analysis.

Pop!Tech

Pop!Tech is a yearly conference in Camden, Maine where several hundred visionary thinkers come together in an ongoing conversation about science and technology and their implications for the future. All Pop!Tech sessions are available to watch free of charge as Pop!Casts. Pop!Casts are Creative Commons licensed high-definition videos and MP3 audio files.

Digg

Digg is a social network that relies on its users to collectively determine what has value on the Web. There are no editors at digg; all stories are submitted and voted on by its users. Categories include: World & Business, Technology, and Science. As a user, I can follow others in order to find like-minded individuals, increasing the likelihood that I will find content that is interesting to me.