Sara Winge

Sara Winge is VP of the O'Reilly Radar group. Since 1994, she's been crafting the O'Reilly story while in a variety of jobs in Communications. She's been involved in launching most of O'Reilly's new initiatives, and, with Tim O'Reilly, co-created Foo Camp in 2003. Her previous jobs, which include furniture refinishing, firefighting, and job counseling, prepared her for working at O'Reilly in non-obvious but crucial ways.

Ignite has a new home

Brady Forrest's new public benefit corporation will nurture Ignite.

Brady Forrest at Ignite Sebastopol.

Brady Forrest at Ignite Sebastopol.

Ignite, the worldwide network of geek events that promise to “Enlighten us, but make it quick,” is now under the aegis of Ignite Talks PBC.

Brady Forrest, who started Ignite back in 2006 with Bre Pettis, has launched this new public benefit corporation to grow and nurture Ignite, a move that makes all of us at O’Reilly very happy. It’s time for Ignite to leave the O’Reilly fold, and we’re certain it will thrive on its own.

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Michael Pollan on Food, Energy, Climate, and Health

In his latest column, Nicholas Kristof encourages President-Elect Obama to heed Michael Pollan's call for a radically new food policy. Pollan makes a convincing case that our current food system is a "shadow problem." If we're serious about working on energy independence, climate change, and health care, we have to change how we're feeding ourselves. During his interview with Pollan…

Huffington, Newsom, and Trippi talk politics in a Web 2.0 world

"Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be President," declared Arianna Huffington from the stage at Web 2.0 Summit, the day after the election. In "The Web and Politics" session, moderator John Heileman explores the new world of running for office–and governing once you win–with Huffington, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and veteran politico Joe Trippi. Politicians…

Radar in Chinese–Crowdsourcing the Translation

At China Foo Camp last November, we got many requests to translate this blog into Chinese. I'm happy to say that Douglas Wan of our Beijing office has ported Radar to a wiki, where staff and a small corps of volunteer readers (from countries including China, France, and the US) are translating entries into simplified Chinese. If you'd like to…

Social Graph Foo Camp–the Videos

On a stormy weekend back in February, O'Reilly hosted Social Graph Foo Camp (David Recordon and Scott Kveton were the instigators; we were happy to say "Yes" when they asked to hold the party at our Sebastopol campus). Google announced their Social Graph API on Friday morning, adding fuel to the fire as the intense discussions got underway. We managed…

The iPhone wins friends and influences people

At O'Reilly conferences like this week's Money:Tech, where businesspeople outnumber developers, the tool of choice to enable continuous partial attention is a mobile device, not a laptop. To my surprise, roughly 80% of my Money:Tech rowmates had iPhones in hand. I expected New Yorkers to be a Blackberry crowd, but it looks like Tim was on to something when…

Why Non-Obvious Brand Icons Work

While pondering why names like Firefox, Fire Eagle, and firedog work for technology products, anthropologist and culture maven Grant McCracken concludes: A Firefox and a Fire Eagle are counter intuitive in exactly the right proportions. These names resist comprehension but only just. They are counter intuitive, but not unintelligible. In the first moment of exposure, we don't quite get…

If You Want My Trust, Give Me Control of my Data

Spock, the people search engine/social network that launched at Web 2.0 Expo, got many things right, but as Tim noted in a previous post, "This private beta of Spock exposes the tips of many icebergs, some of which have the power to sink one feature or another." Looks like they've run smack into one of those icebergs during the…