O'Reilly News & Commentary

When it Comes to News, Why Won't People Eat Their Vegetables? - Chris Lee thinks that people don't get enough news they need, as opposed to want.

One of the basic questions in journalism these days is the one of what news consumers actually want. Chris Lee believes that today's citizenry is getting too much of what they want, and too little of what they need. With the Tools of Change for Publishing conference approaching, it seemed appropriate to talk to Lee, who has spent his professional life in the trenches of broadcast journalism, about where the industry is going and what the future of news looks like.

Bringing e-Books to Africa and the Middle East - Infrastructure, economics and censorship are major issues

In the United States, Western Europe and Asia, e-Books are becoming a major player, especially now that e-Readers like the Kindle and Nook are available. But people living in the Arabic speaking world or Africa haven't been invited to the dance. Two of the keynote speakers at the upcoming O'Reilly Tools of Change conference are working to improve access to e-Books in these areas: Arthur Attwell in South Africa and Ramy Habeeb in Egypt. We talked to each of them about how e-Books are important in their area of the world, and the challenges that they are facing.

The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around - If you've wasted half your life playing Peggle, Bejeweled, Zuma or Plants vs. Zombies, blame these guys!

The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs which spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.

RIA Radio MAX Interviews - Mark Anders, Ed Sullivan, Jesse Freeman, and Julie Campagna

InsideRIA's Garth Braithwaite examines the future of rich internet application development with an eye on happenings with Adobe. In this edition of RIA Radio from Adobe MAX, Braithwaite interviews Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe Mark Anders, ADC Product Manager at Adobe Ed Sullivan, Flash expert Jesse Freeman, and the Managing Editor for the Adobe Edge Newsletter, Julie Campagna.

Real Time Search with Wowd: A Conversation with CEO Mark Drummond

During last year's Summit I had the good fortune to interview Kevin Kelly (see Technology is the Seventh Kingdom of Life). In the interview Kevin made the case that we have only scratched the surface on how to coordinate group activities on the web: there must be hundreds of effective methods to run an auction, crowdsource products etc. We have only scratched the surface so why stop at eBay and Threadless?

Google Analytics for the Real World: A Conversation with Sharon Biggar of Path Intelligence

In preparation for the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit I am posting a few conversations with attendees that embody the Web Squared Theme. Path Intelligence uses sensor technology to understand shopping behavior in retail spaces by detecting and tracking the RF signals from mobile phones. As Sharon Biggar, co-founder, succinctly puts it - "we are like Google Analytics for the real world" giving offline retailers the same visibility on shopping behavior that online retail has enjoyed for years.

Snow Leopard, 10 Days In - No Major Problems, But No Rush to Upgrade Either

A week ago last Friday, Apple unleashed Snow Leopard (aka OS X 10.6) on the world. So far, there haven't been many rumblings either way, although the trade press has been generally kind. We thought it might be a good idea to check in with Chris Seibold, author of the upcoming Pocket Guide for Snow Leopard, to get his take on how things have been going.

Augmenting Reality with the iPhone - Acrossair's Nearest Tube will be one of the first "Terminator Vision" applications

With the release of the 3.1 iPhone OS, application developers will finally be able to develop augmented reality (AR) apps. In other words, Terminator Vision is right around the corner. I recently talked to Chetan Damani, one of the founders of Acrossair, about their new AR applications, Nearest Tube, and what's involved in developing AR applications for the iPhone.

How NPR is Embracing Open Source and Open APIs - Daniel Jacobson Will Talk About the NPR Open API at OSCON

News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing their content, National Public Radio is interested in turning it into a resource for people to use in new and novel ways as well. Daniel Jacobson is in charge making that content available to developers and end users in a wide variety of formats, and has been doing so using an Open API that NPR developed specifically for that purpose. Daniel will talk about how the project is going at OSCON next week, here's a preview of what he'll be talking about.

Making Government Transparent Using R - Danese Cooper thinks it will be an important tool in Open Gov

With Open Source now considered an accepted part of the software industry, some people are starting to wonder if we can't bring the same degree of openness and innovation into government. Danese Cooper, who is actively involved in the open source community through her work with the Open Source Initiative and Apache, as well as working as an R wonk for Revolution Computing, would love to see the government become more open. Part of that openness is being able to access and interpret the mass of data that the government collects, something Cooper thinks R would be a great tool for. She'll be talking about R and Open Government at O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, OSCON.

Sequencing a Genome a Week - Radar Talks to OSCON Speaker David Dooling

The Human Genome Project took X years to fully sequence a single human's genetic information. At Washington University's Genome Center, they can now do one in a week. But when you're generating that much data, just keeping track of it can become a major challenge in itself. David Dooling is in charge of managing the massive output of the Center's herd of gene sequencing machines, and making it available to researchers inside the Center and around the world. He'll be speaking at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, on how he uses open source tools to keep things under control, and he agreed to give us an overview of how the field of genomics is evolving.

Jono Bacon on the Value of Good Communities - We need to build good relationships across all of open source.

Ubuntu has enjoyed fantastic success over the past few years, becoming one of the dominant Linux distributions, and the distribution of choice for netbooks. Jono Bacon's job is to make sure that that success continues, by keeping the huge Ubuntu developer community happy and productive. We caught up with Jono in advance of his appearance at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and he was more than happy to talk about the efforts underway to not only improve the Ubuntu community, but also bring together other communities, such as Gnome and KDE, to help them work better together. Jono officially works for Canonical, a company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth for the promotion of Ubuntu and other free software projects.

Open Source is Infiltrating the Enterprise - Forrester's Jeffrey Hammond Says There's Plenty of it Around, if You Look

There's a persistent perception that open source software is being ignored in the enterprise, that they fear it and it ends up being more costly to deploy than proprietary solutions. That's certainly the perception that some major software vendors would like you to have. But it's Jeffrey Hammond's job to dispel those perceptions, at least when they aren't accurate. As an analyst for Forrester Research, Hammond covers the world of software development as well as Web 2.0 and rich internet applications, so he sees how open source is being used on a daily basis. He'll be speaking at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, talking about the true cost of using open source, and he gave us a sample of what's going on in the enterprise at the moment.

Patrick Collison Puts the Squeeze on Wikipedia - How to Cram the Wikipedia onto an 8GB iPhone

Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browser and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or as defined by AT&T; coverage...) Collison will be presenting a talk on how he did it at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source conference at the end of July, and he spent some time talking to me about it recently.

Want A Job? Learn SharePoint, Says Gary Blatt - 100% of the Federal Government has licenses, but they can't find developers to implement their sites.

Even with an improving economy, there's still a lot of developers out there who are looking for work. And though it may make seasoned Open Source hackers cringe at the thought, one quick way to find employment may be to go over to "the Other Side" and become a Microsoft SharePoint developer. I recently attended the SPTechCon conference, and talked...

Dramatic Increase in Number of Tor Clients from Iran: Interview with Tor Project and the EFF

The Tor Project produces an anonymous proxy services which allows users to evade surveillance. In this interview, Andrew Lewman talks about the Tor Project and discusses some statistics that show its increased use from with Iran. This article also includes some questions and answers with the EFF about the legal implications of running an open proxy server.

Sarah Milstein on Iranian Protests and Twitter

In this 10 minute interview, Sarah Milstein, co-author of The Twitter Book, discusses Twitter's impact on the Iranian protests, the emerging relationship between Twitter and breaking news stories, and she addressed the fear of inadvertent transparency within immediate social messaging communications media.

Walking the Censorship Tightrope with Google's Marissa Mayer

Google sometimes finds itself at an difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. I recently had a chance to talk to Marissa Mayer, who started at Google as their first female engineer, and has now risen to the ranks of vice president in charge of some of Google's most critical product areas, such as search, maps and Chrome. We talked about some of Google's future product directions, and also about how Google makes the decision as to when information has to be withheld from the users. Marissa will be delivering a keynote address at the O'Reilly Velocity Conference next week.

O'Reilly Week in Review for June 1st, 2009 - This Week: Beautiful Security

This week, we have a chat with John Viega, co-editor of Beautiful Security, the latest book in O'Reilly's "Beautiful" series, about what makes security beautiful, as well as what steps consumers and enterprises need to take to be secure these...

O'Reilly Week in Review for May 25th, 2009 - News and Commentary from O'Reilly Authors and Editors

This week, we talk to Damien Stolarz, author of iPhone Hacks, about how hackable the iPhone really is. We also chat with Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene about Beautiful Teams....

Velocity Preview - The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number at Microsoft

The psychology of engineering user experiences on the web can be difficult. How much rich content can you place up on a page before the load time drives away your visitors? Get the answer wrong, and you can end up with a ghost town; get it right and you're a star. Eric Schurman knows this well, since he is responsible for just those kind of trade-off decisions on some of Microsoft's highest traffic pages. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference in June, and he recently talked with us about how Microsoft tests different user experiences on small groups of visitors.

Google Engineering Explains Microformat Support in Searches

Today, Google is releasing support for parsing and display of microformat data in their search results. While the initial launch will be limited to a specific set of partners (including LinkedIn, Yelp and CNet reviews), the intent is that very quickly, anyone who marks their pages up with the appropriate microformat data will be able to make their information understandable...

Velocity Preview - Keeping Twitter Tweeting

If there's a site that exemplifies explosive growth, it has to be Twitter. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is Tweeting, or talking about Tweeting, or Tweeting about Tweeting. Keeping the site responsive under that type of increase is no easy job, but it's one that John Adams has to deal with every day, working in Twitter Operations. He'll...

O'Reilly Week in Review for May 4th, 2009 - A Look at What's New in the O'Reilly Universe

This week, we talk to Tim O'Reilly about how Twitter has dealt with the Swine Flu panic, Make publisher Dale Dougherty about the new interest in the Maker culture, and our usual podcast quiz question....

NiN's Rob Sheridan on iPhone Application Rejection

In this interview with Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan), Nine Inch Nails' Artistic Director, Rob discusses the experience of getting the rejection letter from Apple, and what effect it has on the band's plans to build community applications on the iPhone platform. You'll hear Sheridan express an uneasiness that Apple can act as judge and jury without providing any transparency into the approval process.

O'Reilly Week in Review for April 20th, 2009

This week, we have an extended conversation with Googler Andy Hertzfeld about his latest Google Labs creation, the News Timeline. And, as usual, the O'Reilly Podquiz, that can win you a free O'Reilly Book....

Where 2.0 Preview - DARPA's TIGR Project Helps Platoons Stay Alive

Soldiers on the ground need to know the territory they patrol like the back of their hand. Knowing where insurgents like to plant IEDs or that an important political leader lives in a certain house can prove the difference between success and failure. But what happens when a platoon transfers out of Baghdad and a brand new one moves in? All that experience used to go out the window. But thanks to TIGR, a map-based knowledge-base developed by DARPA, platoons can now document information they learn on patrol, as well as accessing the latest intelligence. In this interview, hear how TIGR was developed, how it is helping troops stay alive and perform their missions better, and what the realities of deploying a brand new technology into a war zone are.

Where 2.0 Preview - Building the SENSEable City

A lot of information we have about cities comes through direct and intentioned observation and study, but could a lot of the time and expense spent on this research be garnered just as well by mining the data that citizens generate in their day-to-day lives through cell phone traffic and internet usage? That's one of the questions that Andrea Vaccari, a research associate at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, is trying to find out. Andrea will be speaking at the Where 2.0 Conference in May on the research that the SENSEable City Project is doing.

Where 2.0 Preview - Tyler Bell on Yahoo's Open Location Project

Location can be a vague concept to pin down. To a surveyor, location means latitude and longitude accurate to a few millimeters, while to a cab driver, a street address would be much more useful. If you're German, I can tell you that I live in the United States. To a Californian, I live in New Hampshire. And to someone from Manchester, I live in Derry. Unfortunately, the way that location is currently stored and presented online is both non-uniform and frequently at a level of precision inappropriate for the end-user. That's part of what Open Location is trying to fix. Tyler Bell, who took his doctorate from Oxford to Yahoo, is currently the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group. At O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference, he'll be discussing Open Location.

O'Reilly Week in Review for April 13th, 2009

This week, we have interviews from Yahoo! and MIT, both previewing talks at Where 2.0. There's also a new podquiz, this week dealing with Microsoft's poor sense of direction, literally......

Where 2.0 Preview - Pelago's Jeff Holden on Creating Stories Out of Your Life

Tools like Twitter and Facebook have let people share in near real-time what they are doing. Now with a new generation of location aware mobile devices, you can tell your friends or the entire world where you're doing it. Jeff Holden's company, Pelago, is one of many trying to come up with a killer application that blends location, images, text and social networking to create a new kind of group awareness. Before starting Pelago, Jeff had a long career as the Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites for Amazon and before that, the Director of Supply Chain Optimization Systems. In this preview of his talk at Where 2.0, Jeff talks about creating stories through location-tagged information, distributing software through Apple's App Store, his work at Amazon, and the privacy implications of location becoming ubiquitous.

O'Reilly Week in Review for April 6th, 2009

This week, we hear from two of the speakers who will be talking at Where 2.0, one on alternative means of sensing our environment, one on telling stories through mobile devices. There's also the answer to last week's quiz, and...

Where 2.0 Preview: Eric Gunderson of Development Seed on the Promise of Open Data

When we think about how government uses geographic information, we tend to think about USGS maps or census data, very centralized and preplanned projects meant to produce a very specific set of products. But Development Seed believes that there are a lot more that could be done if these types of data could be mashed up easily with each other as well as with alternate sources such as social networks. Eric Gunderson, President of Development Seed, will speaking at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference in June, and he recently took some time to speak to us about the potential benefits that open access to government data brings.

O'Reilly Week in Review for March 29th, 2009

This week, we talk to Eric Gunderson about opening up access to government data, and the mashups you can create once you do. Editor Andy Oram discusses what open Cloud Computing might look like. And, of course, we have last...

Brian Aker: What Would an IBM Buyout of Sun Mean for MySQL?

MySQL has had a long and sometimes strange journey from an independent database project to being commercialized; then brought to Sun and now possibly moving to a new home again. Brian Aker is the director of technology for MySQL with Sun Microsystems and probably is familiar as anyone with the life history and current status of the popular open-source database. He recently discussed the current status of MySQL with us, and how it might fare if IBM were to acquire Sun.

Web 2.0 Expo Preview: Will Wright, Sims and Simulations

Will Wright has been the foundational genius behind a thirty year string of blockbuster games, from the early Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 to the first truly fun urban simulation, Sim City. From there he delved deeper into the lives of the individual inhabitants of those cities with the Sims, a game that let players actually shape how his simulated people interacted with one another (while making them increasingly life-like and sophisticated in their own actions). In 2008, he released Spore, where the simulations focused on the evolution of life in a massively parallel game system. Scheduled for June 2009, Wright will release the much awaited Sims 3, in which for the first time, the Sims can explore their world. Wright will be speaking on the Sims and games in general at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. O'Reilly editor Kurt Cagle caught up with Will Wright to ask a few questions.

O'Reilly Week in Review for March 23rd, 2009

This week's podcast features a chat with Brady Forrest, who organizes conferences for O'Reilly, about the upcoming Where conference, and what's happening with geo-aware technology in general. Brian Aker, MySQL guy for Sun, talks about the possibility of MySQL becoming...

O'Reilly Week in Review for March 16th, 2009

This week's roundup include discussion of the Sun/IBM rumors, the future of newspapers, Microsoft and Science Commons teaming up, and the weekly podcast quiz....

O'Reilly Week in Review for March 9nd, 2009

This week's show features a followup with Andrew 'bunnie' Huang about factory conditions in China, the O'Reilly editors talk about jailbreaking iPhones, and this week's podquiz, your chance to win a free O'Reilly book....

O'Reilly Week in Review for March 2nd, 2009

This time around on Week in Review, the Gang of Editors discusses the shrinking IT salary landscape, we hear an excerpt of an interview about the Terry Childs cybercrime case, and there's a new chance to score a free book...

Marc Bohlen: Finding the Intersection of Art and Technology

Artist-Engineer Marc Bohlen uses some fairly advanced technology to express his artistic visions. It's not often you find an artist with a degree from CMU in robotics, or an engineer with an Masters in Art History. Bohlen's projects explore how people and technology interact, ranging from the bickering robots Amy and Klara, to his latest project, the Glass Bottom Float. In advance of his appearance at the E-Tech conference in March, Bohlen talked to us about how he approaches art, and just what art is.

Interview with Infoworld's Paul Venezia on the Terry Child's Case

If you are a network engineer, you might want to pay attention to the continuing case of Terry Childs in San Francisco. In this 15-minute interview, Paul Venezia discusses the inconsistencies in the case, and why every technologist should be paying attention to the outcome of the Childs case.

O'Reilly Week in Review for February 23rd, 2009

This week, the O'Reilly editors discuss how the new stimulus package may effect the alternative energy industry, we hear an excerpt of an interview with virologist Dr. Nathan Wolfe, and get a new patent-related podquiz question to puzzle over....

Interview: Carl Malamud's Grassroots Campaign for Public Printer of the United States

Carl Malamud, an advocate for goverment transparency, is starting a grassroots campaign to become the Public Printer of the United States, a position responsible for the Government Printing Office (GPO). As Public Printer of the United States, Malamud would be responsible for publishing information about the federal government. In this interview, Malamud discusses his seven point platform and his 20 years of experience fighting for government transparency.

ETech Preview: On The Front Lines of the Next Pandemic

With all of the stress and anxiety that humanity deals with on a daily basis, confronting the dangers of global warming, the perils of a financial system in meltdown and the ever-present threat of terrorism; the fact that there's yet another danger lurking out there ready to destroy mankind, the threat of a global pandemic, may be easy to forget. But although you and I may have driven thoughts of Ebola and the like from our minds, Dr. Nathan Wolfe worries about them everyday. Dr. Wolfe founded and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative which monitors the transfer of new diseases from animals to humans.

ETech Preview: Science Commons Wants Data to Be Free

John Wilbanks has a passion for lowering the barrier between scientists who want to share information. A graduate of Tulane University, Mr. Wilbanks started his career working as a legislative aide, before moving on to pursue work in bioinformatics, which included the founding of Incellico, a company which built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research and development. Mr. Wilbanks now serves as the Vice President of Science at Creative Commons, and runs the Science Commons project. He will be speaking at The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in March, on the challenges and accomplishments of Science Commons, and he's joining us today to talk a bit about it.

O'Reilly Week in Review for February 16th, 2009

This week's podcast includes a roundtable discussion by the editors of Microsoft's new retail initiative, excerpts of an interview with Andrew "bunnie" Huang about product design in China, as well as the weekly podquiz, your chance to score a free O'Reilly Book.

ETech Preview: Creating Biological Legos

If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she's also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems. She will be giving a talk entitled, "Real Hackers Program DNA" at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies Conference in March.

ETech Preview: Inside Factory China

China has become the production workhorse of the consumer electronics industry. Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean. But what is it like to shepherd a product through the design and production process? Andrew "Bunnie" Huang has done just that with the Chumby, a new internet appliance. He'll be speaking about the experience at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference. In an exclusive interview with Radar, he talks about the logistical and moral issues involved with manufacturing in China, as well as his take on the consumer's right to hack the hardware they purchase.

O'Reilly Week in Review for February 9th, 2009

This week's podcast features a round table discussion by some of the O'Reilly editors of how the Obama administration is making use of the Internet, an excerpt of an interview with LCD display maven Mary Lou Jepsen, and the weekly...