Ever since I heard him present at a PopTech years ago, I've been a big David Weinberger fan. Now I've been at dinner parties with Tim Berners-Lee; hung out at tech conferences with the likes of John Doerr, spent some time with John Warnock, even interviewed Bill Gates a couple of times. They were all pretty sharp but David (pictured here) is one of the smartest cookies I know when it comes to thinking about the the way we use or could use the Web. I'll bet you'll become a fan too after listening/watching to this presentation David gave a couple of weeks before last November's historic U.S. election. The presentation, given at the University of Toronto, has been archived and presented by TVO's Big Ideas program.

Best-selling author and Harvard Professor, Dr. David Weinberger, delivers the 2008 Bertha Bassam Lecture entitled "Knowledge at the End of the Information Age". He provides insight into the impact of the internet on how we learn and what we know. Weinberger is recognized for his critically acclaimed book "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder".

David is much, much more than that little bio. Among other things, he's an American who lives in Brookline, Mass. but got his Ph.D in philosophy at University of Toronto and he's admiring of us Canadians for many reasons but still proud to be an American. He's also played a significant role in the way the Democratic Party uses the Web. He was the senior Internet advisor to Howard Dean when Dean ran for the Democratic nomination in 2004. (He signed up with Edwards for 2008). You'll remember that it was the Dean campaign that really "figured out" the Internet for political parties and David was a big part of that. In this presentation, you'll hear David refer to politics a fair bit but, for him, it's not just an academic issue: He actually delivered change.

During the last Canadian federal election, I asked David to take a look at what Canada's political parties were doing on the Web. His response, in a nutshell: Not much. All major parties could take a few lessons from what David and the Democrats did in 2004 (much of which was repeated by Obama in '08). Just cuz you got a guy on your staff who knows Flash doesn't make you a cutting-edge new media organization ... So with that, I hope I've sold you on this TVO-archived presentation. It runs about 0an hour.

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