Big Think

If you like Big Ideas videos check out Big Think. Similar to TED in that it brings together a wide-range of thinkers to share their big ideas, Big Think restricts itself to short interviews rather than short lectures. Here’s Richard Florida talking a little bit about the ideas behind his next book, The Great Reset.

[Wordpress doesn't seem to like the Big Think embed player, so follow this link to see the interview with Richard Florida.]

“Well I actually think the [economic] crisis is the inflection point, or the transformation point. … [I]f you look back on previous crises, they’ve always been associated with the rise of new economic systems. So, the crisis of 1873 was associated with the rise of the first industrial revolution, and it gave rise to the second. The crisis of the 1930s was the rise of the second industrial revolution and these big steel companies and auto companies, and then we figured out how to make the society work. This is really a crisis, not just of the financial markets and wanton spending and too much credit, it’s a tectonic crisis that’s associated with the rise of a new economic order.”

You can find the full interview with Richard Florida here.

SXSW

One of the most fun Big Ideas conferences is South by Southwest. 20 years ago SXSW started as a homegrown effort to promote local music to national record labels, and today it is one of the foremost arts and technology conferences in the nation. From its original focus on music SXSW added over the years a film festival and an Interactive week focused on the Web, games, and all things digital.

In previous years SXSW collected MP3s from many of the performers and provided them as a bittorrent file. For years this was one of my favorite ways to discover new music. This year it seems they’ve moved away from the open bittorrent platform to a more restrictive deal with iTunes (including an iPhone app). See their tools page.

Even if you can’t afford a pass, it’s still a great time to visit Austin. There are plenty of free shows around the events to make the visit a lot of fun. And if you can’t visit, you can follow along digitally.

There’s no reason a place like Tampa couldn’t use SXSW as a model to create their own multimedia conference. SXSE anyone?

Talks@Google

From the Department of Big Ideas: Google has been one of the most innovative and successful companies of the last decade. Part of their innovation has been a commitment to the on-going education of their employees by bringing in a wide range of speakers and performers and posting those visits online as part of their Talks@Google (aka AtGoogleTalks) series.

For me these talks are often a perfect lunchtime companion on the days I eat lunch at my desk. Last week Larry Downes spoke about his recently published book The Laws of Disruption.

You can find a larger version of this talk here.

“Larry Downes’ new book explores the accident-prone intersection of innovation and the law.

“What is the Law of Disruption? Introduced in the 1998 classic, “Unleashing the Killer App,” the Law of Disruption is a simple but devastating principle explaining the resistance to change:

“Social, political, and economic systems change incrementally, but technology changes exponentially.

“Where Killer App looked at ways business could use faster adoption as a means to competitive advantage, The Laws of Disruption explores, ten years into the Internet revolution, what has happened to social, political, and legal systems that now lag dangerously far behind.

“In particular, the book describes nine emerging principles for a new legal foundation, built on the unique economic properties of information. These nine principles, representing the most contentious areas of transformation today, form the laws of disruption.”

A list of AtGoogleTalks speakers can be found here.