Tim O'Reilly
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc. Considered by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Strata: The Business of Data, the Velocity Conference on Web Performance and Operations, and many others. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is also a partner at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, O'Reilly's early stage venture firm, and is on the board of Safari Books Online, PeerJ, Code for America, and Maker Media, which was recently spun out from O'Reilly Media. Maker Media's Maker Faire has been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution.
Follow Tim O'Reilly's insights on LinkedIn.Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O
"Never underestimate the web," says Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra in his keynote at Google I/O this morning. He goes on to tell the story of a meeting he remembers when he was VP of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft five years ago. "We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. There was this small company called Keyhole,…
Welcoming Eric Ries to the Radar Team
The Radar blog is a community of thinkers organized around the O’Reilly mission to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. Some of the folks with posting privileges on Radar are O’Reilly employees, others work part-time with us, and others are interesting people we have met along the journey. They are people who’ve stimulated our thinking and helped us reflect on areas we want to learn about. In each case the goal is the same – talk about “Stuff That Matters” and generate meaningful conversation. With that in mind, I wanted to welcome Eric Ries to the Radar community.
Clothing as Conversation (Twitter Tees on Threadless)
Threadless just announced their Twitter Tees on Threadless program. What a great idea. Submit or nominate tweets, community votes, best make it onto shirts. From the two shirts they sent me in advance, I can see only one trick they are missing: the author of the tweet is on the label rather than on the shirt. As I found myself…
Google's Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web
There’s a long-time debate between those who advocate for semantic markup, and those who believe that machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which computer programs actually understand the meaning of what they see and read. Google has of course been the great proof point of the power of machine learning algorithms. Earlier this week, Google made a nod to the other side of the debate, introducing a feature that they call “Rich Snippets.” Basically, if you mark up pages with certain microformats ( and soon, with RDFa), Google will take this data into account, and will provide enhanced snippets in the search results.
Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow
I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric “friend” -based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn’t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a small group of friends, whose book recommendations I also follow. It’s a lovely social network. But every once in a while, I post a link to one of my reviews on Twitter, and am immediately deluged with friend requests. Some of them are from people I know, but whose taste in books I may not share (or even care about), and many are from complete strangers. If I say “yes” to any of them, I have to see every book they review as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t scale.
Who Will Cut The Gordian Knot of Healthcare Billing?
In a story about open source medical records systems, I couldn't help but be struck by the irony in the following statement: Referred to by health care quality guru Philip Longman as an "unrecognized national resource," VistA's open source code is constantly being improved and updated by its users. However, John Halamka MD, Chief Information Officer at the Beth Israel…
Overheard: @edjez on innovation in mobile
Question: When you plug something in do you say “I’m using electricity” or “I’m using the wall socket”? Sometimes I feel the discussion about innovation in mobile tech sounds like a discussion of innovation in energy…where the discussion centers on the design of plugs & sockets. Eduardo Jezierski, in Phones Don't Change the World, People Do. P.S. It's unbelievable…
Overheard: @andrewsavikas on DRM
There are a lot of things I come across in my day that are too long for twitter, and too short for a regular blog post. Inspired by Nat's "Four Short Links", I thought I'd occasionally share great tidbits I've read or overheard. Here's the first. In a discussion on the Reading 2.0 Mailing List, Andrew Savikas uttered this gem:…
Wordle visualization of my Tweetstream
Mike Hendrickson (@mikehatora) sent me a nice Wordle visualization of my tweet stream, dating back as far as Twitter keeps it. As you can see, I retweet a lot. It's also interesting that many of the repeated words are not concepts or topics, but people's names (in the form of twitter handles.) This is one of the interesting things about…
Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web
There’s a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn’t release sales figures for the Kindle, there’s no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there’s Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.) But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning.