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.

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

Google Talk APIs Released -- By tim The march to ubiquity and innovation in IP telephony continues, with Google Talk APIs released. Much as happened with our Where 2.0 conference (where Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and Google and Yahoo! local APIs showed up just in time for the conference), the technology announcements are lining up in advance of our Emerging Telephony Conference. It's not that folks are targeting our conference, it's just that we put ourselves in front of an oncoming train...
[December 19, 2005]

Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python -- By tim I was just looking at our BookScan data mart to update a reporter on Java vs. C# adoption. (The answer to his query: in the last twelve weeks, Java book sales are off 4% vs. the same period last year, while C# book sales are up 16%.) While I was looking at the data, though, I noticed something perhaps more newsworthy: in the same period, Ruby book sales surpassed Python book sales for the first time. Python is up 20% vs. the same period last year, but Ruby is up 1552%! (Perl is down 3%.) Perl is still the most commonly used of the three languages, at least according to book sales, but Python and now Ruby are narrowing the gap.

[December 07, 2005]

The Future Ends at the Firewall -- By tim Great article in the Financial Times about the reversal that has occurred in the past few years, in which richer and more powerful services are now available to home users than to office users: :

New services from companies such as Google and Skype and the spread of domestic broadband access have created a new generation of digitally aware consumers. Having access to free video conferencing, or being able to examine the world in exquisite detail on a programme such as Google Earth, has awakened home computer users to the expanding possibilities of life on the web.
 

When they get to work, however, these same computer users are starting to find that many of the digital goodies they have come to expect are out of reach. That is more than just a frustration for individual workers: as more technology innovation shifts to the web, it could slow the pace at which many new technologies are adopted and prevent companies from reaping the full productivity benefits....

"In a lot of companies, the desktop is locked down – only the IT department has access to it," says Dave Girouard, general manager of Google’s enterprise division. "There's no question that consumer technology is racing ahead at a breakneck pace. Enterprise technology kind of slogs along; the adoption rates are much slower."

Firewalls are only part of the problem dissected by the article. It also talks about IT policies that limit the grassroots technology adoption that has been one of the source of IT innovation since the PC first invaded the workplace, and the lags in bandwidth that make some technologies unusable.

Of course, the office firewall and desktop lockdown are only part of the problem. The US as a whole lags in broadband adoption, due to the shortsighted policies of the telcos. A reminder that the line between the digital haves and have-nots may end up being drawn in unexpected places, with enormous consequences not just for businesses but the economic health of nations.

(Via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed blog.)
[December 04, 2005]

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]

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

Why Is the Web the Way It Is Today? --  December 2005. In what direction could the internet have gone if it were not for the FSF/GNU movement and how would the internet have looked today? Tim O'Reilly offers his perspective.

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.

More Ask Tim >>