CAN"T MAKE IT TO ASPEN?

Now, why is it that they didn't ask me to brainstorm? Aspen's not so bad this time of year. (Note to Walter Isaacson -- I'm generally available for this sort of confab, so, pencil me in, for future reference)

At last week's Brainstorm conference, organized by FORTUNE Magazine and the Aspen Institute, a profusion of voices from many fields spoke up on a surprising range of subjects, all under the rubric of our theme "Life in a Connected World."

Here are some highlights:

Senator John McCain, in the closing talk: "I think we need to stop arguing whether it's happening - climate change is real, and we need to begin to start figuring out how we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Venture Capitalist Vinod Khosla on an energy panel offered Shell (Charts) CEO Jeroen van der Veer a deal wherein companies he is investing in would supply Shell with plant-derived ethanol which it could sell at a price of $1.99 a gallon and still make a good profit.
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in a session on global affairs and religion: "The United States needs to have a moral foreign policy. Now that's a little different than a moralistic foreign policy, where we're telling everyone else what they should believe."
Martin Sorrell, CEO of ad giant WPP (Charts), challenged Marissa Mayer, who heads the search business at Google (Charts), saying he fears the search giant is encroaching upon more and more of his business, especially its fastest-growing piece - media buying and planning.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius said there were still signs that fundamentalism was not triumphing in the Middle East, noting that on a recent trip the hot tickets in Beirut were The Vagina Monologues and an upcoming 50 Cent concert.
World Bank executive Paulo Gomes said Africa is moving ahead faster than most realize. "GDP is growing 5 percent, and inflation generally is below 10 percent," he explained, adding "Ten years ago there were 16 active conflicts, and now we have four."
I enumerate this diverse list of fascinating moments to illustrate what makes Brainstorm different - its range of ideas. We take the most thoughtful (and powerful) people we know from a wide variety of fields and put them together for two days to see what happens.
Since I'm director of the conference, it's no surprise that tech issues were frequently on the surface. The Connected World theme was meant to suggest that issues relating to tech and the Internet affect just about every sphere of business and society these days.
Many of the world's top tech venture capitalists and entrepreneurs were in the audience. Newly-appointed Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie of Microsoft (Charts) told me at a cocktail party how excited he is about his enormously-demanding job. He actually sees the mammoth task of transforming Microsoft for the Internet age as fun.
At one point I mentioned to eBay (Charts) founder Pierre Omidyar that I was not sure we had to have legislation to guarantee network neutrality - the notion that Internet businesses should not have to pay to insure they get their content to customers.
As we walked to lunch, Omidyar explained that eBay's concern has a lot to do with the next generation of Internet routers now coming on the market from Cisco (Charts) and others.
These new routers - through which all the electronic bits that make up the Internet must pass - increasingly will have the capability of detecting exactly where those bits originated and what kind of content they are carrying - video, audio, text, instant message, etc.
Omidyar says eBay worries that this capability may be very tempting for service providers at all levels of the Internet food chain to use to discriminate between content - from local ISPs to long-distance backbone carriers. It's a technical change, in eBay's view, which necessitates this regulatory change.
Brainstormers heard from a panoply of speakers that ranged from former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to Home Depot (Charts) CEO Bob Nardelli to Human Rights Watch Executive Director Ken Roth. Then there were the members of the Japanese parliament, President Antonio Saca of El Salvador, ousted Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and several journalists from China.
To assure the conference itself stayed connected, of course we included a variety of bloggers. They ranged from Arianna Huffington to Asian expert Rebecca MacKinnon to citizen journalist Dan Gillmor to venture capitalists including Steve Jurvetson, Joi Ito, and Fred Wilson.
Also blogging were Google's Head of Special Initiatives Chris Sacca, Wiki software entrepreneur Ross Mayfield of Socialtext, conference expert Gary Bolles of Conferenza, and Diego Rodriguez of design firm IDEO. You can also go to Flickr and see photos taken at Brainstorm by Jurvetson, Mayfield, Esther Dyson, and others.
Fortune's writers also posted our own extensive notes on our own blog where you can still join in the Brainstorm conversation by posting your own comment.