What Is Web 2.0 -- September 2005. Born at a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, but there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means. Some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom. I wrote this article in an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.

GAO Report: Tim O'Reilly's Letter to Congressman Wu -- September 2005. In March of 2004, Congressman David Wu of Oregon made a request to the General Accounting Office (GAO) for a report on the high cost of college textbooks. The GAO report was recently released, and confirmed the fact that the price of college textbooks has nearly tripled from 1986 to 2004. I wrote this letter to Congressman Wu referencing O'Reilly's solution: SafariU.

The O'Reilly Radar 2005 -- March 2005. The opening keynote for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference was delivered jointly with Rael Dornfest. It opens with Rael's "rules for remixing," segues into an abbreviated version of my "internet era business model design patterns" talk (which I also gave at Eclipsecon), and then finishes with some other things that are on our radar. The slides (PDF) are on the ETech presentations page. There's also a good summary of my comments on Alice Taylor's blog.

Get Your Hands Dirty! -- January 2005. Hackers of all stripes refuse to just take what they’re given. They’re driven to remake it, and getting there is more than half the fun. In the latest O'Reilly catalog, Tim writes about the host of new books and products within that celebrate the hacker impulse. We've got the information you need to hack, remix, and master technology at home and at work. So go on, get your hands dirty!

Read/Write Web Interview: Web 2.0 -- November 2004. In Part 1 of this Read/Write Web interview, I talk with Richard MacManus about the Web 2.0 Conference, the relationships between Apple and the web and Microsoft and the web, and data ownership and lock-in. In Part 2, we explore business models for web content, including discussion of RSS. And Part 3 focuses on eBooks, social networking, collaboration, and Remix culture.

Pick the Hat to Fit the Head -- October 2004. Larry Wall once said, “Information wants to be valuable,” and the form in which information is presented contributes to that value. At O'Reilly Media, we offer a variety of ways to get your technical information. Tim O'Reilly talks about it in hisi quarterly letter for the O'Reilly Catalog.

MacDirectory Interview: Tim Loves His G4! -- September 2004. I talked with Simon Hayes at MacDirectory.com about the success of the Mac platform, Apple's innovative support of digital media and networking (exemplifying David Stutz's "software above the level of a single device"), and what O'Reilly Media has in store for Mac users and administrators.

Technology and Tools of Change -- June 2004. Building the next generation of technology won't be easy, and will require developers, entrepreneurs, and the customers they serve to learn new skills. O'Reilly has a collection of new and favorite tools for building the future, including a new "Technology & Society" book series, a new "Web 2.0--Web as Platform" conference, and a new print-on-demand, custom books service called SafariU.

Open Source Paradigm Shift -- June 2004. This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus' annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations ranging from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User's Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat's internal "all-hands" meeting, and BEA's eWorld conference. I finally wrote it down as an article for an upcoming book on open source,"Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software," edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani and to be published by MIT Press in 2005.

State of the Computer Book Market -- February 2004. We've launched a new market research group at O'Reilly. Its mission is to develop quantifiable metrics for the state of technology adoption. Aided by Nielsen BookScan sales data, which shows us trends in what people are buying, we're able to evaluate trends in technology adoption that should help us do a better job of forecasting technology growth patterns. In this letter I wrote for O'Reilly's Spring 2004 Catalog, I share some of our analysis, something I expect to do more of in the coming year.

A FOSDEM Interview: Reinventing Open Source -- February 2004. I'll be speaking at FOSDEM this year on the subject of how next-generation applications are changing the rules of the computing game. In this interview, I talk about O'Reilly's book publishing program, past and present, and my goal to create the maximum value for users, developers, and everyone in the software ecosystem. Today that means coming to grips with the way the computer landscape is changing, giving up old open source battles from the 1980s and 1990s, and focusing on how we might reinvent open source in this age of the Internet. (Slides from my talk are now available in PDF: The Open Source Paradigm Shift [4.4MB].)

My fundamental premise is that the world we all grew up in--the world of both Microsoft and the Free Software Foundation--is fundamentally challenged by the Internet. The Internet (not Linux) is the greatest triumph to date of the open source approach, yet it has changed the rules of software deployment so fundamentally that many of the techniques embraced by the open source community as first principles don't necessarily give the desired results. We need to reinvent open source in the age of the Internet. My talk gives some suggestions for what we need to think about.

We're All Mac Users Now -- January 2004. Wired News talked to a bunch of folks (including me) for comments on the 20th anniversary of the Mac. Nice words from all of us about just how important the Mac has been to the computer industry.

Apple has been able to reinvent itself because it has what is, at bottom, an aesthetic vision, rather than one that is solely based on profit and loss. Like Shaw's proverbial "unreasonable man," they try to bend the world to their vision. And they articulate that vision consistently, and persistently.

The Future of Technology and Proprietary Software -- December 2003. In celebration of its 25th anniversary, InfoWorld did a feature on where technology has been and where it's headed: 25 Years of Technology. Tim O'Reilly answered some questions for that piece about the future of technology and proprietary software. Many of his comments were included in the article, but here they are in their entirety, as well.

INTO: What Are You Into? -- November 2003. I don't know how old I am, but I do know I'm passionate about making jam. Macromedia produced a short video clip of me (requires Flash Player 7) on its "Into" web site. When you've launched "the experience," click on my head, the third mug from the left. "What I hope for the future of the web is that it becomes unnoticed. The ultimate success of any technology is for it to be transcended. And that is the essence of human progress, that things that were once cutting-edge become common place. And that's kinda cool."

Organized in reverse chronological order within each subject, with a brief extract from each piece so you can get the flavor without actually following each link.

• O'Reilly & Associates' History, Business Model, and Values
• Editorial Philosophy
• Software and Business Method Patents
• P2P, Web Services, and the Emergent Internet Operating System
• Open Source Software
• Publishing Industry, EBooks, or the Practice of Publishing
• Reviews: Books that Have Shaped My Thinking
• Science Fiction
• Travel Writing
• Miscellaneous

Walt Mossberg on mobility -- By tim Brian Jepson sent in a link to a blog about Walt Mossberg's take on how mobiles are overtaking laptops. An excerpt:

"As talented a speaker as he is a writer, I was eagerly anticipating Walter's lunch time Key Note at the Venture Wire Consumer Technology Ventures conference. Speaking to a capacity crowd...in fact the biggest crowd I saw assembled during the entire conference, Mr. Mossberg made my day when he echoed a number of things I've just recently predicted including the fact that mobile devices will far exceed the PC in importance for most people, that security is something that must be addressed before the enterprise will be able to successfully accommodate mobile devices and that the ultimate incarnation of the ideal mobile device is something that still hasn't been realized and which might end up being quite surprising when it finally is..."

Turing's Cathedral -- By tim Edge.org has an absolutely brilliant article by George Dyson, based on a talk he recently gave at Google. Entitled Turing's Cathedral, it contains the usual Dyson deep dive into the history of computing, reminding us just how prescient and thoughtful Turing, von Neumann, and the other pioneers were, along with some spectacular, evocative imagery, and a killer punch line. One of the more thought-provoking articles about Google and the future of computing that I've seen.

I'm half-kicking myself for being behind on my email, since George sent me the text of the talk a few days before he went to Google, with the subject line "Web 3.0", and I had the half-formed thought to ask George if I could publish it, before that thought got buried in the incoming flood of other, more urgent mail. But I'm only half-kicking myself, since Edge did such a sweet job of getting George to flesh out the talk into a fully framed article, incorporating the experience of actually delivering it at Google.
[November 13, 2005]

As Gadgets Replace Toys, What's In it For Kids? -- By tim Interesting NYT article reprinted by the International Herald Tribune about the way that toy companies are rethinking themselves as consumer electronics companies. The article doesn't live up to its provocative title, focusing more on the companies and their strategies than on the consequences for kids and the nature of play, but it's worth reading and thinking about anyway.

How children interact with technology, and how it changes both their relationship to technology, to other people, and to the world around them, is something that all of us should be paying attention to, since it's one of those "long now" type issues where the consequences won't be known for at least a decade. I'd love your thoughts.
[November 06, 2005]

Oops - Only 4% of Titles Are Being Commercially Exploited -- By tim In a recent post, I made the assertion that 10-20% of titles published were still in print and being commercially exploited, with another 20% clearly in the public domain, leaving approximately 60% in what I called "the twilight zone" -- with no clear rights. Farhad Manjoo of Salon, who is writing a followup story, emailed me for confirmation of those numbers, and in so doing, made me realize an error I'd made. I had taken the number supplied by the OCLC, of 10.5 million unique titles in the five libraries cooperating with the Google Print Library Project, and applied to that the recent report by Nielsen Bookscan that 1.2 million unique titles sold at least one copy in 2004, and came up with the estimate of 12% I used in that prior post, which I generously expanded to 10-20% by assuming that books that didn't sell even one copy might still be considered "active" by some publishers.
 

However, in answering Farhad's question, I realized that the correct number to work with is not the 10.5 million unique titles in the five libraries working with Google, but the 32 million unique titles in the entire OCLC "WorldCat", which represents their best estimate of the number of titles held in all US libraries. That math leads to the following revision of the picture I published earlier:

[November 04, 2005]

Live Software -- By tim I'm at a Microsoft press event in San Francisco to introduce the concept of "Live Software." The big takeaway: Microsoft is fully engaged with thinking about what I've called "Web 2.0." They are focused on the internet as the platform, on software as a service, on creating rich experiences across multiple devices, on live update as a metaphor for both software and documents, on grassroots adoption as a result of user conversations. They are also very clearly focused on advertising as a new business model. We're hearing all the Web 2.0 buzzwords: RSS, AJAX, social networking.

My favorite line, from Ray Ozzie: "Some say that the internet itself is the platform, and in many ways that's true. The internet has always been described as a network of networks, and it's now becoming a platform of platforms, as every web site is potentially a platform." During the Q&A;, I asked specifically if this meant that data and services could be syndicated out as well as in (that is, that Microsoft software wouldn't just be consuming services from other web providers, and allowing users to syndicate them into their experience, but also that developers on other web platforms could as easily integrate data from Microsoft applications and services into their user experience. Bill Gates replied with puzzlement, "Of course. There's no difference between syndicating out and syndicating in. It's just XML." I hope he's right, and this means that we'll see lots more data availability out of Microsoft systems and services.

Overall, I was really heartened by the presentation. Competition is good for the industry, and good for users. As they did in 1995 with the first coming of the Internet, Microsoft clearly now gets that the starting line has been reset, and everything is up for grabs. I'm looking forward to the next couple of years, as competition does indeed make what we experience today a pale shadow of what will soon be possible.

Another key takeaway for me from this presentation was that Microsoft realizes the power of being able to build an integrated experience across a hardware device, a software application, and an internet service. Ray Ozzie cited iTunes as an example (as have I), and pointed out the similarities to the Xbox360. Microsoft has more than a decade of experience with hardware devices, and has been involved in everything from game consoles to phones, PDAs, automobiles, and more. This may turn out to be a trump card that gives Microsoft an advantage against players like Google and Yahoo! (This is another reason why Macromedia (now Adobe) is going to be an important web 2.0 player, as Flash is one of the best cross platform alternatives for rich web experiences on devices. Disclaimer: I am on the board of Macromedia.)

The remainder of this entry attempts to give a running transcript of the event.
[November 01, 2005]

Google Print Debate on Farber's IP List -- By tim Over the past couple of days, there have been quite a few interesting postings about the Google Print controversy over on Dave Farber's IP List. There's a lot of the usual back and forth, but a couple of postings that give some background on possible legal precedent. Sid Karin argues that the mp3.com case is the guiding precedent, while Cindy Cohn of the EFF believes that Kelly v. ArribaSoft will be the more relevant. Seth Finkelstein points to a series of legal articles over on the Scrivener's Error blog, which focuses on procedural aspects of the various legal complaints. Doug Masson points to his 1995 article on the difficulties inherent in adapting copyright law to new technologies.
 

Meanwhile, there are lots of us engaged in less substantial attempts at persuasion, including an opinion piece by Cindy Cohn, with a response from Lauren Weinstein; another post in favor from Julian Dibell, again rebutted by Lauren Weinstein. There are also pro-Google opinions from John Levine and David Reed, and an argument against from David Pakman, to which I replied.

Clearly this subject is generating a lot of heat. Probably time to give it a rest, since the parties are really just negotiating through lawyers and press releases, and eventually, this will get sorted out without the help of all us keyboard quarterbacks. I'll try to post on the subject in future only if there are more facts to discuss, not just more opinions. (However, radar-wise, I will say that this is one of the most important cases in copyright today, one that will have enormous implications for the future of publishing, one way or another. So it's definitely worth following.)
[October 30, 2005]

More Radar Posts >>
More O'Reilly Network Posts >>

Is Perl Still Relevant? --  July 2005. With the emergence of .NET, J2EE, Python, PHP, et. al, has Perl lost its niche as a scripting glue language? Tim O'Reilly comments.

When will Perl 6 ever get done? --  August 2004. It's difficult to make predictions about when Perl 6 will be released. For one thing, Perl is still and always under development; for another, there's no rush. perl.com editor Simon Cozens writes that if you have a pressing need for Perl 6, more developers are welcome.

RepKover Binding --  March 2004. O'Reilly has good--no, great news about RepKover lay-flat binding, the very durable and flexible binding method that allows the interior of a book to "float" free from its cover and lay flat open on your table.

Amazon and Open Source --  February 2004. Amazon realized early on that amazon.com was more than just a book site, more in fact than just an e-commerce site. It was beginning to become an e-commerce platform. Open source has been a key part of the Amazon story, and although Amazon has closed code, it has created its own "architecture of participation" that may be even richer than that of many open source software development communities.

Did Amazon Listen? --  December 2003. After all that controversy over Amazon's 1-Click patent, what's this about them receiving a patent for new features on their ordering forms? Tim explains that Jeff Bezos never said he'd stop filing for patents, but that he'd think twice before enforcing them in a potentially offensive way.

O'Reilly's E-Book Strategy --  November 2003. O'Reilly's e-book strategy is to build a flexible data repository supporting XML web services that will allow us to deliver content into a variety of channels. The O'Reilly Network, which offers online content in bite-size chunks, is the "smaller" part of the strategy; Safari, a database of thousands of books that you can search across, is the "bigger" part.

Are "how to" books archaic? --  November 2003. A reader asked us about O'Reilly's vision for future books given the rate of change in technology and the growth of the Internet as an information source. Tim says "how to" books will only become more important as the paradigm shift that's taking place in computing leads us into uncharted territory.

What happened to BountyQuest? --  October 2003. What ever happened to BountyQuest, the web site where people could post large rewards for documents proving prior art on a patent, thus proving a patented invention is not really new?

E-Books and P2P --  September 2003. Why doesn't O'Reilly offer stand-alone e-books? As an advocate for P2P, wouldn't it follow that Tim would make O'Reilly books available for download? Tim talks about P2P, copyright, the value of giving away content, e-books as a business model, and the potential of O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf.

National Competitive Advantage via Open Source --  August 2003. Do countries that embrace open source as a part of government policy gain a competitive advantage over those that do not? It's certainly possible, since open source can lower the cost of computing and increase the rate of innovation. But Tim is wary of open source entering into legislation: "Governments should mandate outcomes, not means, and they shouldn't be picking winners and losers."

More Ask Tim >>