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

Bikers as Alpha Geeks -- By tim James Governor of RedMonk wrote in email: "I couldn't help but read this and think hell's angels = foo." James is completely right on. We completely see the parallels. The "alpha geeks" and FOOs are the heart of O'Reilly's brand. As we reach out to different audiences and topics, we do our best to remember that, and to tell a story about how our core value proposition is in our ability to spot those people and technologies that are going to turn things upside down. This is our mission: Changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.
[January 27, 2006]

Afraid to tell people what books their developers are really reading? -- By tim

On the O'Reilly editors list, Mark Brokering writes: "Check out this bookshelf in the Microsoft ad that just ran in PC Magazine". (Popup image.)

Interesting indeed. The ad, with the caption, "Find tools and guidance to defend your network at microsoft.com/security/IT" features a developer at his desk. On the desk is a shelf full of books. Leaving aside the fact that most of them aren't security books, what caught our attention was that the three books on the end were O'Reilly books, with the cover of the book visible on the end photoshopped to take the animal off the cover and to modify the title on the spine.

The Long Snout -- By tim

Chris Anderson famously named the long tail-- the idea that in the internet era, success belongs to companies that can address the end of the demand curve that is populated by millions of low-volume products, rather than a small number of high-volume products. Last year, noodling on the long tail concept, Rael Dornfest somewhat waggishly pointed out that there's an analogous phenomenon on the front end of product creation, which he called "the long snout." That is, there are millions of emergent products and technologies that may or may not catch on (consider the fact that there are over 100,000 projects on sourceforge alone), and that we needed a lightweight way to document and present information about those projects, so we could start publishing about them early on, and track them up the development curve as well as the demand curve.

VoIP handset on sale in UK supermarkets -- By tim Over on slashdot: "Tesco, the UK's largest supermarket chain, has announced plans to sell a VOIP handset and connection through their stores. Given that one out of every eight pounds, spent on shopping in the UK goes to Tesco, and the UK has one of the highest broadband takeup rates around, is this the end for the classic telecoms providers like BT?"
 

Death comes slowly to big companies. (Hey, Unisys is still around!) So I don't know that the doomsaying for the telecoms is right. But there's sure a world of hurt -- and a world of opportunity -- ahead in VoIP. That's why we're holding the Emerging Telephony Conference next week. And why our recent book on Asterisk is blowing off the shelves... (We've sold nearly 10,000 copies since its release in September.)
[January 19, 2006]

Top 30 Networks Accessing Make: Digital Edition -- By tim

Dan Woods, associate publisher of Make: Magazine, wrote: "In doing some subscriber research, I came up with an insight into some of the major institutional affiliation of MAKE subscribers. It's really a top-30 look at the most popular company/institutional networks through which MAKE subscribers access their digital edition. Doesn't necessarily map directly to Makers place of work or study, but likely provides a good insight into sub-communities of makers by employer or University. Anyway, I thought you might find it interesting."

I did indeed find it interesting, and thought you might too. It could of course just be an artifact of the core O'Reilly customer base, but it's still fascinating to see all the big companies that are eagerly tracking the latest projects of the DIY alpha geeks. Here's the list:

Search Engines as Leeches on the Web -- By tim Jakob Nielsen's provocative posting on whether search engines are taking too much of the pie strikes a chord. This issue is very much on our radar here at O'Reilly, as we're crunching lots of data from Google Book Search trying to understand its impact on our core business. (Thanks to Google for providing so much detail!) We're comparing the daily Google search logs with our print book sales and with Safari books online (a service that essentially monetizes the ability of readers to search our books) to evaluate where search helps sales, and where it hurts. I'll be reporting more on that subject soon.

It's easy to see why folks with paid content businesses would be concerned about giving away too much information via search engines, but it's really interesting to see the same concerns springing up around free content sites. Google and Yahoo! have done a good job of providing ad revenue back to small content providers with AdSense and Overture, but their model is also a threat to many prevalent kinds of advertising. And of course, the search engines get a huge amount of revenue from advertising on the index pages themselves. I tend to think that the search engines earn their keep, but I've got my ear to the ground, and Jakob makes a thoughtful case. From his posting:

"We've known since AltaVista's launch in 1995 that search is one of the Web’s most important services. Users rely on search to find what they want among the teeming masses of pages. Recently, however, people have begun using search engines as answer engines to directly access what they want -- often without truly engaging with the websites that provide (and pay for) the services."

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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.

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