Fortune Brainstorm 2006 is underway, and it will be coming to you live right here through Friday afternoon. Fortune Brainstorm what, you say? Well, this is Fortune's every-other-year event wherein we, the Fortune editorial staff, get to invite 300 or so of the people we're most impressed by to come spend a week talking, eating, drinking, and hiking at the Aspen Institute. Think Sandra Day O'Connor, Lance Armstrong, and Chris DeWolfe (the founder of MySpace) -- and then throw in a few dozen Fortune 500 CEOs. Take our word for it: the list goes on. And on. We've got the President of MTV and the CEO of the Blackstone Group. Silicon Valley is in the house (Doerr, Gross, Khosla) as are biggies from China and India and some of the leading lights of the environmental movement. Get the picture? This week, at least, we've got the name dropping game in the bag. But, seriously, the point is not to preen, but rather to generate a few ideas that might be helpful to someone, somewhere -- hopefully to many people in many places.

The stated theme of the gathering is "connectivity," which is sufficiently broad to allow people to talk about pretty much anything, but narrow enough to get the conversation started. It also gives some of us an excuse (read: air cover) to blog the event. Even an old media shop like ours has figured out that we can't be talking about connectivity in this day and age without somehow digging up a blog. So we plan to bring you the most important and the juiciest of bits from the meetings, even as we bicker over exactly how "on the record" we should be. We certainly don't want the prospect of an over-active blog to put a chill on the open conversation that has been a trademark of past Brainstorms. Then again, if we see the Grand Mufti of Bosnia lunching with Shimon Peres and John McCain, well, we think the rest of the world might be interested. And we'd like to hear from you on the subject.

So, stay tuned: over the next 72 hours a handful of the Fortune editorial staff -- some old school print types, some new media junkies -- will be reporting live from Aspen via this page. We hope it will make for an interesting conversation.

Welcome to the Fortune Brainstorm 2006 Blog.