For each need that we have, we can find a supplier. For each ingredient in the food that we consume every day we can find a shop for. What about knowledge and ideas? These are also ingredients that we need every day, in order to function properly. Sometimes I look around me, at the people that are passing by me, and I observe the fact that many of them are just too focused on the task of day, on the job that they must take care of. A job that most of the times takes us to some ordinary and repetitive actions, where the imagination, ideas and the improvement of the knowledge are not required or, even worse, useless.
We must understand (or remember if we have forgotten), that the human being is by excellence a creative being, is able to create, design and craft new things for the sole purpose of entertainment, not just for survival or for getting to the food.
Although I don’t have much time after work, I usually split this time in reading a book, reading news on subscribed channels and working on personal projects. Here are three sites that I want to share and talk about, sites that basically provide the food for thought, provide a good start for and a good load of ideas and knowledge.
www.ted.com
The first one is http://www.ted.com, standing for Technology, Entertainment and Design, where you can watch presentations held by various people from these three worlds. I will not get into further details about the site, you can read more about the goals of ted.com by accessing the About section of the site. What I want to say is that watching the presentations is a source of new ideas and very mind opening. The manner in which the subjects are presented, in a simple and direct way, without the fuss of scientific details, they all make this site one of my favourites.
www.droppingknowledge.org
The second site that I want to talk about is http://www.droppingknowledge.org. Here users can post questions, answer to already posted ones and generally share the knowledge that they have. If you want to just assist, you can browse through the archive of questions and see what answers have been posted for each question. The format of the site is somehow similar to Yahoo! Answers, except that the level of the questions is much higher. The subjects discussed range from global warming to the meaning of life. If ted.com was the source for ideas, droppingknowledge.org is clearly a source for possible answers and discussions on some very hot and difficult subjects nowadays.
cultivatinro.wordpress.com
The third site, which is actually in its infancy (or was at the time of this writing), being started on 21st of november, 2008, is http://cultivatinro.wordpress.com and is in romanian only. The idea behind it is quite interesting: 7 people post on each day of the week, each one of them having assigned one day of the week. There is also possible to invite other people to post on the site. The posts are Computer Science related and their goal is to bring into discussion various themes from the large field of IT. Since each new comment is potentially a new point of view for the target post, I really hope this blog will get bigger and more people will visit it and join the discussions that are sparked by the posts.
Conclusion
This post aims two things: the first one is to talk about ted.com, droppingknowledge.org and cultivatinro.wordpress.com, three sites that provide interesting ideas and discussions.
The second goal is to make you remember that we must stay creative, we must read information sources that provide us with quality content (not the Sport magazines or the 1000th buddy’s homepage on hi5, facebook, myspace, zorpia, you-name-it 
). And if possible, engage in conversations, share ideas that you have and the knowledge that you posses, because one of the ideas that you give to someone might sparkle another idea and then another idea, and this could lead to the next big breakthrough in science, art, music or any other field.