The annual Technology, Entertainment, Design conference brings together speakers from around the globe, each getting 18 minutes to fascinate and inspire the audience with their ideas in art, science, technology, nature, humanity, music, religion and everything in between.

The speakers are a veritable who’s who of the world’s best and brightest. Recognizable names such as Bill Clinton, Bono, Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon), Richard Dawkins, Peter Gabriel, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (co-founders of Google), Tony Robbins, and James Watson share the stage with unfamiliar, but equally, if not more compelling speakers like Wade Davis (National Geographic), David Deutsch (physicist at the University of Oxford), Frans Lanting (nature photographer), Rev. Tom Honey (Canon Pastor of Exeter Cathedral), Helen Fisher (anthropologist), Joshua Prince-Ramus (architecture), and Jehane Noujaim (filmmaker).

One of the highlights of the event is the TED Prize. Three people are selected before the conferenc, each getting some prize money and, more importantly, one wish to present to the TED attendees. This is the 2nd year for the TED Prize, one of last year’s prize winner was Bono, and his wish was “to help build a social movement of more than one million american activists for Africa”. TEDsters acted and set up ONE.org, Sun Microsystems provided technology support, others provided funding, marketing, and media access. Today, ONE is a network more than two million strong.

This year, another wish maker was Dr. Larry Brilliant who played an important role in the wiping out of Small Pox. His wish was to help build an early warning system to protect us from a pandemic outbreaks such as the Bird Flu. In addition to other supporters, he was approached by the founders of Google to head up their $1 billion philanthropic foundation Google.org. It will give him a great head start in reaching his goal.

Check out the documentary The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED, It will make you feel better about the state of the world and humanity. Also, be sure to go to TED.com and watch and be inspired by these brilliant speakers.

I just signed up for an OpenID. Seems like a cool idea and it’s getting more and more support from web2.0 sites. Since it’s still relatively new, I managed to get Ran as my OpenID. Get your own at myopenid.com.

Check out WhoIsSick.org It let’s people post their symptoms and displays the result using the google map interface. So if you’re not feeling so well, it might be because there’s something going around in your area. It’s still kinda new so I’m not sure if it’s comprehensive enough yet. But it’s still a cool idea and an interesting thing to check out even if you’re not sick. Here’s an article about it on ars technica.