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.A Manifesto on Health Data Rights
I was surprised when I met recently with a congressman in Washington, a former physician, to talk about healthcare reform. When we moved to the topic of portable health care records, I was quite startled to hear him say “When I was practicing as a physician, I considered those records to be my property.” After all, he said, they were his notes, his analysis. Given this disconnect, I was glad to endorse today’s Health Data Bill of Rights.
Velocity: The Art of Web Operations
Two years ago, at the 2007 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, a group of web operations professionals, led by Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders along with O'Reilly editor Andy Oram, asked for a meeting with me. Their message: "We need a separate conference for our community." That community: the web operations professionals who keep sites up and running. They knew I…
The Benefits of a Classical Education
As some of you may know, I got my undergraduate degree in Greek and Latin Classics. So when Forbes asked me to do an interview on the subject of how my Classical education had affected my business career, I agreed. The result, part of a special report called Power, Ambition, Glory, used only a small part of the interview I provided, so I decided to publish the entire interview here.
Health Care Costs: Am I missing something? Or is there a lot of flimflam going on?
Driving home from work, listening to NPR's story about health care costs, I couldn't help but be struck by a couple of numbers. The Obama health plan will cost a trillion dollars we're told. A TRILLION sounds big enough to end the debate, doesn't it? Then I hear, almost as a footnote, that that trillion is over ten years. That's…
Personal Democracy Forum: Politics in the Web 2.0 Era
In the past year or so, I’ve been urging people to work on stuff that matters. The world is faced with serious problems, and we in the technology community have a unique contribution to make, as the tools we’ve created help us to collaborate and organize at an unprecedented scale outside of industrial-era top-down organizations. One area where technology and real world concerns meet is in the challenge of remaking democracy in a Web 2.0 world.
Jeff Bezos at Wired Disruptive by Design conference
Jeff Bezos is very quotable. Listeing to Steve Levy interview him at the Wired Disruptive by Design event in New York, I was furiously taking notes. Here are the quotes I managed to capture: "We've co-evolved with our tools for thousands of years," he says, explaining how ease of Kindle buying changes behavior. "Reading is an important enough activity that…
Google I/O in Pictures: Google Culture at Work
I had a few miscellaneous notes on Google I/O that I wanted to share, including a few anthropological observations best made with pictures. I thought it was really interesting that there were more registration lines for Academia than there were for general admission. Google knows the same truth as Apple, that students are the future. They are making it really…
Google Wave: the Early Days
After the press conference following this morning's keynotes, I was part of a small group conversation with Lars Rasmussen, head of the Google Wave team. He told the story of how they pitched Sergey Brin on the Wave project. "We'd worked on our message," he said, "and we boiled it down to this: 'We think we have an idea that…
Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?
Yesterday's Google I/O keynote highlighted the power of HTML 5 to match functionality long experienced in desktop applications. This morning, Google plans to announce an HTML 5-based application – still very much in the early stages of development – that represents a profound advance in the state of the art. Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the original creators of Google Maps,…
Google Web Elements and Google's Iceberg Strategy (Google I/O)
At Google I/O this morning, DeWitt Clinton announed Google Web Elements, a new simple interface layer to Google Ajax APIs. The goal is to make bringing Google features to other sites as easy as cut and paste. And indeed, the cut and paste functionality is impressive: Add news, custom search, conversations, maps and more to your site with only a few clicks. If the earlier HTML 5 announcements were for developers, these announcements are for everyone else. Any blogger can easily incorporate Google services.