They nailed me. Funny!

Ahh, the TED Jealousy leaked out of the blogosphere yesterday. First there was a Twitter fight between Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s CEO (who was at TED) and Mike Arrington, TechCrunch’s founder (who was not). Then a journalist from BusinessWeek, Sarah Lacy, beat up TED for not being inclusive.

I’ve been there. I used to get jealous when I got locked out of events. Heck, just go back a few days and read my post about living a FOOCamp life.

But yesterday I had revenge: I went to Bil.

And next week I’ll have revenge again: I’m going to BarCamp.

See, I don’t get why people complain about being locked out of events. TED is giving us all an opportunity: create our own experiences that are more interesting than those on the floor of TED *and* more open!

Yesterday one of the TED attendees started bragging about how great going to TED was.

I answered “sounds great, but yesterday I hung out with Annie Leibovitz instead.” That ended the bragging, although having Robin Williams in front of you does sound pretty damn cool.

Anyway, why are bloggers and journalists jealous? I think Mike Arrington had some deep transparency with this comment on this Twitter: “regarding TED attacks – I defame anything cool that ignores me, until it stops doing so. it’s worked so far.”

Seriously: bloggers and journalists live and die by having access to stories and storymakers. Anytime there’s a gathering of executives we know there are potential stories, so we want to go.

If locked out (TED doesn’t invite many journalists, only letting a handful in and those who go have to agree to a lot of rules) then bloggers and journalists start feeling jealous of those who do get to go. We’re a competitive bunch, because if someone else is getting the stories then those locked out feel beaten.

But that’s based on a false premise: that only rich and powerful people can create stories.

I’ve found that’s not true. Sarah and Mike, you could have come to Bil. Why didn’t you? There were lots of geeks showing off lots of toys. There were even speakers who have spoken at TED. More videos from yesterday here and here.

One thing, though, TED does have the best badges (video shows why).

So, Sarah and Mike, will you be at the Barcamp at SXSW? Or, you gonna keep complaining about events that lock people out?

Hey, maybe the three of us should do an event the way we think it should be done? Imagine if Fast Company, BusinessWeek, and TechCrunch collaborated on an event. Wouldn’t that turn up something interesting?

Ryan Stewart (who works at Adobe) wonders if Microsoft is bringing an offline version of Silverlight out this week at Mix.

I’m hearing that Google is about to ship something major offline too.

So, for the next month we might hear “go offline” from all three camps (Adobe already shot their big guns in this war at last week’s “Engage” event).

Microsoft should have the best offline technology, because it’s king of applications on your desktop, but I think that answers the wrong question.

I’m trying to get everything I do online because I want freedom from my computer.

What do I mean about that?

Well, what if my computer gets stolen? I don’t want any data on it.

What happens if Linux comes out with a Macintosh killer? Or if I decide to get a Windows computer again (I’m currently using a Dell Tablet PC because they sent me one to try out) I want to just load one thing: Firefox and go to work. Right now I’m switching between my Dell and my Mac without any problems at all because almost everything I do now is in the browser.

The thing about Microsoft is that they’ll do some killer offline technology but it won’t work on the Symbian cell phone or iPhones that I’m currently using. It won’t work on Android, which is the Google cell phone OS that’s soon to make an impact on the market. It won’t work on Linux (which is getting a LOT better on the desktop, so I might try that again this year). And it won’t work well on Firefox or Opera or other new, non-IE browsers. (Channel 9 doesn’t work well with Silverlight on my new Dell when I use Firefox 3.0beta3, while Flash and AIR work just fine).

So, I guess the question is: can Microsoft keep the world as it is (IE, one that mostly runs on Windows and Office) or will the world follow bleeding-edge users like me into a more online world?