Sarah Milstein

Happily between gigs right now, Sarah Milstein was until recently UBM TechWeb's GM & Co-chair for Web 2.0 Expo. She's also co-author, with Tim O'Reilly, of The Twitter Book and a frequent speaker on social media for business. Previously, she was on the senior editorial staff at O'Reilly Media, where she founded Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) and led development of the Missing Manuals. Before joining O'Reilly in 2003, Sarah was a freelance writer and editor, and a regular contributor to The New York Times. She was also the CSA program founder for Just Food, a local-food-and-farms non-profit, and co-founder of Two Tomatoes Records, a label that distributes and promotes the work of children's musician Laurie Berkner. She holds a B.A. from Rutgers University and an M.B.A. from U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Bonus fact: she was the 21st user of Twitter.

TOC Highlights

TOC ended on Wednesday afternoon, and in addition to the sessions we’ve already blogged here, I wanted to note a few other highlights that I caught. In the Gadgetopia session, Bill Damon of Harvard Business School Press gave a handy tip: If you want your organization to explore publishing on electronic devices, get some sexy hardware into the hands of…

TOC Day 2

Things are bubbling along very nicely in San Jose, but I was taken aback this morning to realize that being program chair does not mean you can magically attend simultaneous sessions. Dreadful disappointment. On the other hand, I have reams of notes from the juicy presentations I did catch, and I'll be able to share some cool ideas over the…

TOC Day 1

Today was the first day of Tools of Change. As with many O'Reilly conferences, we arranged the event so that this would be a day of tutorials–meaty, how-to sessions for publishers working on new technical challenges. I don't yet know if attendance is an indicator of larger trends, but Digitizing Your Backlist and Incorporating POD Into a Profitable Publishing Strategy…

Multi-constraint Search: Emerging

Lately, I'm bumping into more and more projects that aim to automate and handle complex consumer web searches and transactions, like booking travel for a multi-leg overseas trip with lots of family members who have varying needs. (You could think of these services as multi-constraint search.) To wit: * At the Web 2.0 Summit last fall, I had lunch with…

TOC Speakers in the News

Tools of Change is a mere three weeks away, and Chris Anderson has just announced his new startup, BookTour.com, which he'll be presenting at TOC on June 19. A smart author and marketer, Chris has hit on an idea to help authors promote themselves–one that could become an important force in publishing. Speaking of forces in the sector, Brian Murray…

TOC Conferece: Early Registration Deadline Extended

As I blogged earlier this week, and as Tim has written in the past, we have a new conference for book publishers, Tools of Change, launching in June. The early registration deadline for the conference was yesterday, but we've gotten such enthusiastic response, we've decided to extend the early-bird discount to May 21. Sign up now to make sure you…

Early Registration for TOC Closes Tomorrow

Tools of Change, O'Reilly's new conference for book publishers, debuts in San Jose, June 18 – 20. Early registration closes tomorrow. For TOC, we have a big goal: exploring and inspiring innovations in book publishing. It's no secret that technology presents new challenges to publishers every day. But what about new opportunities? We've found publishers of all kinds trying cool…