No matter how busy I am or how little time that I think that I have, the one website that I find myself frequently visiting/revisiting is TED. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and its genesis in 1984 was as a conference that brought together individuals representing those three worlds. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

While I have never had the opportunity to attend one of the conferences, I have been able to reap many of the benefits through their website which makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free, called TEDTalks. TEDTalks began as a simple attempt to share what happens at TED with the world. Under the moniker “ideas worth spreading,” talks were released online. They rapidly attracted a global audience in the millions. In fact, the reaction was so enthusiastic that the entire TED website was re-engineered around TEDTalks, with the goal of giving everyone on-demand access to the world’s most inspiring voices.

As of today, more than 250 talks from their archive are now available, with more being added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. With 50 million views since the debuted online two years ago, TED talks have become a powerful cultural force. To celebrate this milestone, they have released a never-before-seen list: the Top 10 TED talks of all time, as of June 2008. You can watch the video below:

The top 10 TED Talks of all time include:

1. Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
2. Jeff Han: Touchscreen demo foreshadows the iPhone
3. David Gallo: Underwater astonishments
4. Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo
5. Arthur Benjamin: Lightning calculation and other “Mathemagic”
6. Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
7. Hans Rosling: The best stats you’ve ever seen
8. Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better
9. Al Gore: 15 ways to avert a climate crisis
10. Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote

I have seen many of these Talks, but a few I had never seen and will be heading back over to TedTalks to watch them. What I like most about them is that they are intelligent, on-point, and full of wisdom and inspiration. They are perfect for getting an idea of what is going on in the world today and more importantly what is possible. If you have some time, I’d highly recommend spending it there.

This excellent slide show demonstrates the growing importance of micro-blogging and makes a case for “social objects” rather than social networking, and then lays out 5 principles for building services around them. Engestrom argues that “sites that fail are just ’social networks’,” whereas sites that have succeeded have organized around social objects such as music, photos, favorite websites, and books. He contends that microblogging with such applications as Twitter are disruptive because they are simpler, cheaper, and only need a mobile device to work, making them also more convenient.

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How many times do you encounter a problem or challenging situation but get stymied in your search for a workable solution? If you are like most of us, it happens all of the time. I am one of those who are truly amazed by the true innovators among us and and during the Great Ideas Conference back in December, I posted a tweet where I pondered: “Where do great ideas really come from?” Needless to say it’s an area that I am extremely interested in because it is as much art as it is science and requires the ability to be in the moment and keeping an eye on the future.

In a recent Economist article: The accidental innovator, Evan Williams, founder of Obvious and creator of Blogger and more recently Twitter, was profiled and he shared some of his thoughts about innovation.

What I found most interesting and useful about the article was Evan’s pragmatic approach to innovation. He cites three primary insights gained during his time creating Blogger, working at Google and as he has further developed Twitter and ramped-up his work at Obvious:

1. Genuinely new ideas are stumbled upon rather than sought out.
2. New ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known.
3. Good ideas seem obvious in retrospect.

Great thoughts and something to really consider in our everyday lives. I really appreciate his commitment to making stumbling on accidents a core competency. My key take away from the article and from Evan, himself, is his willingness to embrace mistakes and use them to his advantage. Blogger was created out of frustration with collaboration software and Twitter was created by asking the simple question: “What can we take away to make something new.”

What frustrates you or your members? What can you take away from one (or more) of your processes, programs, services, etc. to make something new and potentially more valuable? It may not be the only or best approach to innovation or problem solving but it does give you a great starting point.