OK, it was my first time. I was sucked in by the ecstatic repeat attendees, the flow of exceptional online videos, and the opportunity to reach out to the rich and famous.

What struck me right upon arrival at this year’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference was why all these titans of industry and icons of innovation were willing to wait endlessly on line for a goodie bag of stuff they clearly didn’t need and could more easily buy closer to home.

The Banal
What really put me in a bad mood was New York Times columnist David Brooks serving up a witty talk that was so sexist I was stunned that the women in the audience didn’t stand up and boo.

When he was done, he was given what emcee Chris Anderson calls a “standing O.” Chris had just pleaded with the audience to “reserve standing Os” for only the best of the best speakers, but they stood up for David.

‘Where am I?’ I asked myself. (Videos of all the talks will soon be online so you can see what I’m talking about.)

And hang in there—in a second I’ll tell you who was brilliant.

Later, soda pop queen Indra Nooyi, chairwoman and CEO of PepsiCo, was given the floor as part of a session titled “Worlds Imagined” to promote her cause-related marketing program, “Pepsi Refresh.”

Now for one, I’d already read about the program and hadn’t paid $6,000 for the opportunity to listen to her advertise it. I came to hear what she planned to do about the obesity crisis, how she plans to stop stealing fresh water from farmers in the developing world, and why she still claims that firing 3,300 in people in 2008 wasn’t a radical measure to deliver earnings numbers (this after she told Fortune Magazine that her job was to balance, “the profit motive with making healthier snacks, striving for a net-zero impact on the environment, and taking care of your workforce”). I left disappointed.

Franz Hanary might be a great magician and the “star of his own live show, Mega Magic, the largest touring illusion production in the world,” but he wasn’t why I came to TED either. Bill Ford, executive chair of the Ford Motor Co., was just boring. Then there were silly and nearly incoherent presentations, like the one given by Ed Tenner, who is no doubt a really nice and certainly bright guy, but didn’t belong on the stage. Neither did others who were there to promote commercial products, raise money, crow about achievements or simply congratulate themselves.

The Brilliant
But enough of the banal; on to the brilliant. Wadah Khanfah, Director General of Al Jazeera, the only international TV network based in the developing world, works tirelessly to bring transparency and dissenting voices to repressive states and political hot zones and deserved the “standing O” he received.

As did composer/conductor Eric Whitacre; the Handspring Puppet Company; Carlo Ratti, an amazing architect and engineer; and Aaron Koblin, an artist specializing in data and digital technologies, whose work uses real world and community-generated data to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and technology. Homaro Cantu, the executive chef at Chicago’s Moto restaurant, is a “food engineer,” who has figured out how to make watermelon taste like tuna in order to save the species and how to make nutrition bars taste like French fries. Morgan Spurlock, who spent 30 days living on McDonalds’ hamburgers didn’t disappoint the crowd as he discussed his new film. Bruce Aylward explained his plans to eliminate polio everywhere in the world.

But the one presentation you just absolutely have to see is, without a doubt, the one given by Salman Khan, an educator extraordinaire who has revolutionized the educational experience for high school kids with brilliant online videos that teach everything from algebra and calculus to geography and English. He’s created 2,000 free courses, which are viewed 100,000 times a day around the world. One million students a month getting excited about learning at their own pace thanks to this former hedge fund analyst.

Thanks to innovators like this, TED has a fairly impressive reputation as the go-to platform for the world’s most vital new ideas, but I can tell you this: Having attended for the first time this year both TED and Pop-Tech in Camden, Maine, which costs a comparatively puny $3,000 and which has better quality control, a more acute focus on solving the world’s problems, and a stronger sense of community, you’ll find me at Pop-Tech this fall, but probably not at TED in 2012.