One of the highlights of TED 2008 for me was watching “visual cartographers” David Sibbet and Kevin Richards capture the essence of the presentations with their amazing illustrations, sketched, posted and shared in real time using Autodesk’s BIGVIZ system. From a practical point of view, a lot of my post-TED blues is trying to sort out all the ideas from my scribbles. BIGVIZ is a perfect transactive memory because it is a clear notation of what I remember from the talks.

Thanks to Autodesk, the BIGVIZ document is available for all to download as a PDF (along with a movie).

I was familiar with David Sibbert’s work through his work as Sunseed Bardeen at “The Grove” in Second Life, where he’s using yet another remarkable canvas for visualization. It’s worth a visit to see what he’s done there, as well.

One thing leads to another: I came back from the TED Conference inspired to write some software to find connections between the different TED speakers (something I do manually while listening to each speaker). While looking for concordance software, I stumbled upon DMDigest that led me to the We Feel Fine project.

You'll have to check it out, but basically they have scraped millions of blogs, etc. identifying sentences proclaiming feelings: "I feel..." "I am feeling...". They then go to town on the mining and interface of this, and turn it all into playable art. Mashable art, as it turns out, because they have open APIs. Which got me thinking....

And I threw together the "Theater of Feeling" in Second Life and I've installed it on Clear Ink Island. It's a work in progress as I'm also experimenting with the image and color data served up by the wefeelfine.org people. It's easy to use, but addictive. Just go up and chat "/feel" and a feeling. "/feel good" "/feel lousy" "/feel generous" and see 10 excerpts elaborating on those feelings floating above platforms. Click the platform to go to the source. That's it! But it offers both an insight into what people think they need to share with the world for all time, as well as the mashability of Second Life. Come take a look for yourself.

Oh, and I do feel good about this experiment!

Cameron Sinclair, 2006 TED Prize winner, Executive Director of Architecture for Humanity, co-editor of the book 'Design Like You Give A Damn' and contributing writer for Worldchanging.com will be joined by Sun Microsystems founder John Gage in a live audio discussion in Second Life.

They will discuss collaboration and participation in 3D environments, as well as the newly launched 'Open Architecture Network' - which represents the fulfillment of Cameron's 2006 TED wish. The event will feature a virtual version of the 'Porchdog' and the Global Village Shelters - both of which are contributions to the Open Architecture Network.

The event will be held on Clear Ink's Allston sim HERE (SLurl) on Tuesday, April 24th at 10:00 am PDT (SL-time). Installations and live audio stream will also be available at the University Project sim (SLurl), and the live audio can also be heard on Clear Ink Island (SLurl).

Sponsored by Sun Professional Services, coordinated by Clear Ink.

At the TED Conference tonight in Monterey, I was blown away by the double bill of Paul Simon and Bill Clinton.

This tops my previous all-time presidential double bill (hey, I was 16!) of Wayne Newton and Richard Nixon in Las Vegas.