Brady Forrest, organizer of the popular Ignite events. (Dan Schlatter/PSBJ photo)

Brady Forrest, 35, is a technology evangelist for publisher O’Reilly Media, and the chair of the Where 2.0 conference and Web 2.0 Expos. He’s also co-creator and organizer of Ignite, a popular series of fast-paced, geeky talks that started in Seattle and has spread around the world -- a phenomenon to be marked with “Global Ignite Week,” March 1-5, in more than 70 cities. To top it off, sex columnist Violet Blue recently named Forrest the “#1 male sexy geek for 2010.”

We spoke with Forrest about those topics, plus his trademark silk jackets, in a recent conversation. Continue reading for edited excerpts.

Q: What is the appeal of the format that you guys came up with for Ignite?

Forrest: The format is 20 slides, 15 seconds each, and they auto-advance. It’s five minutes long. What I have noticed is that, at a lot of conferences, you go to a longer talk, and within five minutes, you know if you’re interested or not. And in some ways the rest of it isn’t needed. You know if you’re really going to learn about the subject, you’re going to have to read more later. It seemed to me that there was room for an event where basically you just had a bunch of those five-minute talks.

What’s beautiful about the 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide, is that because the format is so constrained, people have to be creative in other ways. They can relax into the format, but it makes them really shoehorn their content into it, and it keeps them concise and on target. They have to think about every word they’re going to use. And it keeps the audience much more engaged, especially when they realize that there’s always the chance that the speaker is going to screw up. They’re pulling for the speaker, and there’s always so much pride and happiness for the speaker when they just nail it.

Q: What makes a good Ignite talk?

Forrest: A good Ignite talk either informs the attendees or gives them something to think about. I find it’s usually best to do something that’s aspirational. Take a topic and flip it on its side. Or take something mundane, like Hillel Cooperman’s Lego talk, where tons of people have Legos, but then to see the extremes that Hillel has gone to -- an entire Lego room, and how many thousands of Lego pieces Hillel has -- was just a great example. Another wonderful talk is Molly Steenson’s talk on pneumatic tubes that were used in Paris back in the 1880s. A whole network, 270 kilometers of these pneumatic tubes, and that’s how people send notes to their lovers and postal mail back in the day, before the telegraph took off.

Q: What was the inspiration for Global Ignite Week?

Forrest: A co-worker of mine, Janetti Chon, one day was like, you know what you need to do, you need to have a global event. You need to pull them all together. I started thinking about how much that made sense. Because Ignite is so spread out, and really they come together online. It seemed to be the most logical way of doing it. The other model that we’ve considered, and maybe we’ll move to in some future time is kind of like a poetry slam, where there’s regional contests, but we try to make Ignite more about the community and less about competition.

Are you going to meet the goal of having at least one Ignite on every continent? I don’t know. We’re working on Antarctica. We’ve got six continents lined up, and I’ve got two contacts in Antarctica. One is still actively trying to figure it out. ... I actually just got an email (address) for the tweeting astronaut (TJ Creamer) so I’m going to see if I can get someone from the space station to do it.

Q: That’d be great. I wonder what he’d do it on.

Forrest: I hope just space life. I think that would be a great topic for him.

Apart from the fact that you and (Ignite co-founder) Bre Pettis were here, what about Seattle contributed to the culture that led to the spawning of Ignite?

It’s very much because it was Seattle that it got started. I just saw that there weren’t that many tech events. It seemed like there was room for an evening geek event that was less of a commitment than MindCamp. And that’s what got me thinking about it. Then Bre and I connected in Brussels, actually, at an O’Reilly event, and that’s where we started talking about it. The original plan was to make it super-complex. We had ten different content types, we had a panel, and then we had some of these five-minute talks with these weird slides. And we realized we weren’t going to be able to pull it off, and so we almost scrapped the idea, and I was like, screw it, I’m just going to do an evening of these talks, and we’ll see where it goes from there.

Q: Obviously from there, then, it went global.

Forrest: Yeah. No idea. A selfish reason that I was doing it was I had just started as a conference chair, and I had never really had any experience doing that. This was my opportunity to practice.

Q: So what have you learned from Ignite about organizing conferences?

Forrest: The biggest thing for me was stage presence. Just literally being on stage more, that helps me out a lot, intro’ing speakers. But also how to curate an event. And then the other thing is finding new talent, new speakers.

Q: Speaking of stage presence, one of the questions I was going to ask you was about your jacket that you wear on stage -- is it a red velvet jacket?

Forrest: (Laughter) Are you talking about my pink silk jacket? When I started at O’Reilly I negotiated the summer off, and I went and backpacked around China for one month of that. My last stop was Beijing at the Silk Road Market. I had that jacket made. I went back a year-and-a-half later and I had a blue jacket made.

Q: My impression is it’s like, oh, it must be Ignite night, because Brady’s wearing the jacket. (Laughter)

Forrest: I do kinda try to make it like that, yeah.

Q: You don’t wear that just out around town.

Forrest: Not all the time. I’m rarely shy about how I dress.

Q: Speaking of that, Violet Blue gave you a very special honor. What has that been like, how have your friends reacted, and in what ways has it changed your life?

Forrest: Well, I got engaged the night that I found out, so I was quickly taken off the market, formally, and it has been a source of much ribbing. It was awesome, I was very surprised. I had no idea. It is mostly guys who mention it to me. I don’t think there has been a woman, other than some close, close friends of mine, who has mentioned it to me. Whereas a lot of guys are like, so, sexiest geek, huh? My housemate has taken to playing “I’m Too Sexy” around the house sometimes when I’m around, and asking me to dance for him.

Q: Apart from staying atop that list, what are your goals for the next few years?

Forrest: Well, I want to continue growing Ignite. There’s been a lot of branching off, like there’s Ignite Spatial, we just had some people contact us about Ignite Money. I also want to bring Ignite to more universities. I want to have people from the regular Ignite and the students talk together, so that the students see what it’s like to be a geek out in the real world. The students at the University of Washington who approached me about it, they wanted to bring some geek pride to their fellow students, they felt like their fellow engineers weren’t always as proud of their geekness as they should be, and so they wanted to use Ignite in that way.

Q: What about yourself personally?

Forrest: I advise Pathable, and I’d like to advise more startups, and I’ve been debating where to take my writing. I’ve been considering doing an Ignite book. I’m not sure exactly what that would look like, but I’ve got an Evernote notebook that’s started to be dedicated to that. On a personal level, I bike everywhere now, and have just really been getting into biking, and I also started climbing in the past year. That’s now my main sport that I do.

See more Ignite talks on the Ignite Show video podcast. Seattle's Global Ignite Week event will be held March 4 at the King Cat Theatre. Where 2.0, chaired by Forrest, is scheduled for March 30 through April 1 in San Jose. Follow Forrest on Twitter @brady.