TED Global 2009 happened last week in Oxford, London and Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the UK, gave a pretty powerful keynote speech about the our responsibility in overcoming the challenges faced by a global society.

In one excerpt, he mentions the importance of the role that the web and emerging technologies will play in this:

"I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. We now have the capacity to find common ground with people we will never meet but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the modern means of communication, that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with, and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society. "

Powerful stuff.