I’m a big fan of the concept of “ideas worth spreading,” but I also realize how hard it can be to give a little idea with potential the nudge it needs to flourish in the wider world. One way to be more effective is to see where obstacles and pathways exist.

Before TED, we started gathering tweets with the #tedactive hash tag to see which ideas were rising to the the top (and which were languishing). We can also see who’s driving the conversation (you’ll see our team member @acarvin as the fountainhead for a ton of retweets), and some trends in how great ideas go from theTED stage in Long Beach to making a difference in far flung cities around the globe.

Check it out yourself on this dynamically updating map (thanks to Claude and the team at Nexalogy) and we’d welcome your feedback on how to use this to lower the “cost” of spreading worthwhile ideas!

http://nexalogy.com/demo/tedactive/