TED seems like such a cool conference. No doubt, they are doing something right when they sell out a year in advance of each conference! In an interesting twist, releasing much of their session content as free online videos has done nothing but drive further interest in the live event.

Anyway, there’s a ton of great presentations archived at the TED site (including one by game design guru Will Wright) and I’ve made it a personal mini-goal to watch a bunch of them. Browsing the archive, I caught myself bookmarking all the speakers/topics I was already familiar with.

So what? There’s gotta be some research out there already regarding the “magnetism” of the familiar. Well, the irony here is that TED is explicitly designed to cross-pollinate topics/speakers/areas of knowledge via their single track approach (and of course, very careful curation over the sessions) and their vetted attendee list.

And, now that I think about it, I often do this at bigger multi-track conferences. Rather than looking for new stuff, I always go to see the topic I already know a lot about (ya know, so I can “compare notes” or more successfully heckle).

Would be nifty to put on a game industry conference on all the stuff we don’t know much about (aka, “The Stuff You Should Know, But Have No Clue You Should Know Conference”). Would anyone actually show up?