IMHO TimBL did a great job at TED. I dunno where you have seen him stressed out - he certainly enjoyed it. Btw, linked data is mainly about URIs and HTTP and yes RDF (for the data model part) and some lightweight vocabularies such as FOAF, SOIC, Dublin Core, etc. - check out http://webofdata.wordpress.com as well, I blog there about it ;)

Cheers, Michael

PS: To be honest, I was also sort of surprised to see him calling the audience like 'speak after me'. However, I was positively surprised - I really like when people put enthusiasm in things and not only give interesting but boring talks. In that sense I very much support TimBL to continue this (though, maybe not go as far as Steven B. at MS did with his infamous 'monkey dance' ;)