Dale Dougherty
Dale Dougherty is founder and executive chairman of Maker Media, founder and publisher of Make: magazine, and co-founder of Maker Faire. Dale has been honored by the White House as a "Champion of Change." He's been instrumental in many of O'Reilly's most important efforts, including founding O'Reilly Media, Inc. with Tim O'Reilly. Prior to Make, he was the developer of Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial website, launched in 1993 and sold to America Online in 1995. He was also developer and publisher of Web Review, the online magazine for Web designers from 1995-1999. Dale was publisher of the O'Reilly Network and he developed the Hacks series of books. He is the author of sed & awk.
Kith and Kindle
Amazon's personal electronic reader cannot go it alone. Here is an idea for the Kindle to become part of the social media landscape. Let's call it Kindle's Family and Friends plan. Similar to a few cell phone plans, let a Kindle user share books for free with up to five members of their family or friends. Once you identify your…
Web 2.0 and Advertising: Do We See Eye to Eye?
Ad agencies will admit to the limits of traditional media, saying, okay, maybe we don't know consumers the way we ought to but this new technology is going to give us all that…. Advertisers and their agencies are drooling that they will deliver highly targeted advertising messages that audiences will find more relevant, producing better results than they've seen in the mass media…. On the other hand, Amazon's product recommendations seem moderately useful, although it can't distinguish a short-term interest from a long-term one, or a category of book I buy as gift for another person from one I buy for myself…. So my basic takeaway from MMF was: Will the new advertising that targets the audiences of Web 2.0 sites and services be seen as relevant and useful by that audience?
Education@Web 2.0
I wonder if among the entrepreneurs and vc's gathering for the feeding frenzy that's become Web 2.0 Summit, there are people thinking about what Web 2.0 means for education. Facebook grew out of a university, and they were able to do something that the university IT department wouldn't or couldn't do. However, is Facebook or MySpace thinking much about ways…
Local Recycle & Reuse Hits A Bureaucratic Roadblock
Let's imagine that you set up a non-profit to recycle electronics and divert computers from going directly into landfills or otherwise being destroyed by a grinder. You look for ways to refurbish these components and possibly recombine them into functional computers that go out to areas and institutions that have difficulty obtaining computers. You might even collect some of the…
Journalism is Burning Or How Breaking News is Broken
On a day when Alan Mutter told us at Radar about his blog post on the ten-year low for ad sales in print newspapers, I had the thought that most of a newspaper is a waste of print. Much of it goes unread and all of it is thrown away. Maybe the shrinking of newspapers is a good thing, and…
New Era of DIY
Giving a talk at NI Week organized by National Instruments in Austin, TX, Chris Anderson of Wired and author of "The Long Tail" spoke about DIY and open source hardware, according to an EETimes story. I think he's pointing at a significant breakdown in the way mass markets have worked. "Instead of a small number of products for millions, it's…
Microsoft Reaches Settlement on EOLAS Patent
The retrial of the EOLAS '906 patent lawsuit against Microsoft was to have begun on Monday in Chicago. I learned yesterday that Microsoft had reached an agreement to settle the case with EOLAS so I would not be called to testify this week. I am relieved to not have to fly to Chicago for the trial but I'm not sure…
Save The Shipyard
The Shipyard in Berkeley, a collection of shipping containers and a collective for artists and tinkerers, was given three days by the city of Berkeley to "vacate and abate" or face fines of $2500/day. The Shipyard has a history of conflicts with the city of Berkeley, such that the city denied them access to the electrical grid. In response, The…
Toast Burner at Target
Makezine.com editor Phil Torrone writes: A long long time ago I made a hacky toaster that burned images, it was for a pitch to holiday inn – pre-2000, all blank stares. Years later, alpha geeks made all sorts of toast art and toast projects… Now it's here, a shipping a Pop-Art Toaster at Target. No idea who made it, but…
Used and Antique Machines
This weekend, we held a ReMake event at ACCRC in Berkeley, giving makers coming to Maker Faire a chance to look for a few interesting things to play with. The previous weekend, ACCRC had held an Earth Day electronics collection, and James Burgett had put out bins of fascinating things to take apart or just to take. Of course, all…