TED and Pop!Tech have become two of my favorite conferences for digging into the big ideas of our times and finding ways to integrate and engage with the world outside the conference halls as well.

Last week Pop!Tech began releasing new talks — Pop!Casts — from its phenomenal fall 2006 lineup. You can subscribe to receive video or audio of the talks as a podcast, watch them in your browser and also download them individually. There’s so much good stuff here — Thomas Friedman’s (and his latest NYT Magazine article on the Power of Green, which also features great illustrations and a video clip online), Erin McKean’s and Chris Anderson’s are a great place to start. They are not only free but offered with a Creative Commons license, so you can edit and redistribute them. Yet strangely, they don’t provide obvious permalinks to individual presentations, nor an easy way to link, send or embed the videos elsewhere.

TED, whose new site launched officially today, has upped the ante in several ways. We loved TED’s first iteration of TEDTalks, but their new site (launched officially today) has upped the ante in several ways. They manage to capture some of the magic of the conference itself: the big themes that emerge from all these fascinating ideas and the conversations around them. You can You can visualize them sized by most talks/emailed/discussed/recently updated. You’re invited to create a profile and tag your favorite themes, videos, speakers all about sharing and communicating over the themes and ideas, and you can check out the profiles of other people with similar interests. Well done!