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.
A Life in Science: Paul Lauterbur
Paul Lauterbur, the father of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, died in March. MRI machines are widely used to examine physical tissue in the brain and other parts of the body. The Economist has a well-written obituary of Lauterbur that begins: The whole history of modern science, Paul Lauterbur once joked, might be written on the basis of papers turned…
Whoop It Up
Or The Best Way To Sell "Whoosh Boom Spat" is DIY Promotion You write a book and find a publisher. Here's what you think the publisher is going to do for you to promote the book: take out ads, do a promotional media tour, send out free copies to a press list in hopes of garnering free publicity. That's the…
Bag the Schwag
If the tech industry and its associated conferences have any serious notions about reducing our impact on the environment, one small step would be to minimize the amount of schwag distributed at tradeshows, most of which ends up in a landfill. Above, Violet Blue's photograph from SXSW shows the pile of 5,000+ bags filled and waiting for attendees to…
This is My Space
Sunday's keynote at SXSW by Phil Torrone, Senior Editor for Make, and Limor Fried featured a cellphone killer app. She calls it Wave Bubble, and instructions for this project are on her website. The resulting device, which Limor admits is illegal to operate, will disable nearby cellphones. Actually a few months ago, I was riding on Amtrak with a certain…
Another War We're Not Winning: Us vs Spam
Are we losing the war on spam? Is the war on spam a war we can win? Is there any reason for hope? When I learned how much spam was hitting our servers at O'Reilly, I decided to ask several long-time Internet luminaries these questions. Was the situation as bad as I thought it might be? In short, the answer…
Good Grief
One of the most amazing riffs I've ever heard at a conference was created by Martin Varsavksy, the Argentinian-born, Madrid-based entreprenuer behind FON, who was moderater of a panel titled "How To Be Good?" at the DLD Conference in Munich Germany last week. What's more, the riff led to an even more fascinating exchange with Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the…
The Influence of TiVo
Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Motorola, said consumers now demand more from their televisions, largely thanks to TiVo, which has forced the cable companies to ask suppliers for more innovative set-top boxes. “Enough people are experienced with time-shifting that there’s a demand that the industry dynamics change,” Ms. Warrior said. New York Times, Wed January 17 How…
Genealogy Too
I have spent the past few days diving into genealogy on the Web, counting just how many generations of coal miners there are in my family. (Three is the current answer.) I have discovered as well that genealogy is a perfect area for Web 2.0 applications. I was using Ancestry.com, a fee-based service, which has a few elements of Web…
Clay Shirky on Second Life
If Shirky is now writing for ValleyWag, I'll take it as a sign that the gossip-blog might be trying to do something other than sniping. In his "A Story Too Good To Check," Shirky takes the press to task for the uncritical acceptance of the estimated number of users in Second Life. Someone who tries a social service once and…
DIY Featured in Design Awards
All of us at Make are proud to have been selected to be in the National Design Triennial at the Smithsonian's National Design Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt in New York City. The exhibition opened last Friday to quite a crowd. Make's original creative team, David Albertson and Kirk Von Rohr, were there, along with Phil, Sherry Huss (Director of Maker Faire),…