TED is cool… and that’s not ego talking

Think of it as a chance to get smart in tasty 20-minute chunks. Oh, and it has a great name. The 25th Annual TED Conference opens today in Long Beach and Palm Springs, California, and once again it will be a brain-studded event, featuring 18-minute talks by Bill Gates, Nate Silver (whose site fivethirtyeight.com was a statgeek’s nirvana for political coverage), author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), whose new work discusses whether genius is bred or made, and many more.

But it is the names you might not recognize that make the TED events, and the website at TED.com, truly special.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become broader, but the mission stays the same:

Invite brilliant people. Give them 18 minutes to be brilliant. Share it with the world.

The talks – now more than 200 of them – are available online, and are all available with a Creative Commons copyright, so they can be freely shared.

And it is engaging stuff. I know plenty of people who come to the site and download TED talks regularly, then take 20 minutes at lunch or on their commute to learn something each day. Conference organizers (and there are now TED events all over the globe) post the talks a few at a time, so there are always new ones – and since they’re about big ideas more than specific ventures, they don’t get dated.

This year, the conference has created a new TED Fellows program, inviting 40 more brilliant minds from all over the globe to take part in the conference and community, expanding the reach of the events and engaging another whole level of interesting and remarkable minds.

It’s already a good and popular one. 15 million people have visited TED.com in just 21 months – and it’s a worthwhile stop for anyone looking for a little weekday inspiration and entertainment.

But while TED is popular at 25, Facebook is a phenomenon at 5. 150 million users spend an estimated 3 billion minutes a day on the site – which is now a noun and a verb in popular culture. Founder Mark Zuckerberg says in the Facebook blog that there are still more big plans for the site – and while the 5th birthday thank you gift is a little lame, there is no question the site itself has changed the way people connect and stay connected to friends and colleagues.