| CARVIEW |
Tim O'Reilly
Various Things I've Written
I've started to have trouble tracking down my various, scattered writings and interviews on the Net myself, so I decided to create a page where I could find my own words when I wanted to refer to them. I figured some other people might want to look at this archive as well. If you're interested in even more than you find here, check out my official bio, my short official bio, and my personal bio.
Recent Interviews/ArticlesHappy Accidents -- March 2011. Paul Hontz from startupfoundry.com began his interview with the question, "What is up with the animals?" that populate the covers of our books. The answer is, of course, that it was one of many happy accidents that brought O'Reilly to its place in the market today. MIX Maverick -- December 2010. Gary Hamel, a professor at London Business School, interviewed me for The Mix, an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management. Part I. Feed the ecosystem or build a monoculture? and Part II. Designing the Edge-in Organization Health 2.0 2010 -- December 2010. In my keynote at this year's Health 2.0 conference, I spoke about how Web 2.0 technologies are changing the healthcare industry and what the major healthcare providers can learn from the dominant web players like Google and Amazon. Web 2.0 2010 Debrief -- November 2010. Right after the Web 2.0 Summit, John Batelle and I sat down at an FM event and debriefed each other on what we learned. The Battle for the Internet Economy -- October 2010. In this webcast with John Batelle, founder and CEO of Federated Media Publishing, we introduce the Web2.0 Summit schedule with a discussion about the topic driving the conference this year: the points of control and the future of the internet economy. We talk about the players and the big questions facing us in the most exciting transitional times since the dot com bust. "There are some really powerful strategies in play that are going to affect every developer, every entrepreneur, and you need to figure out whose strategies are going to hurt or help you and who you can ally yourself with in order to achieve your goals." DC Law.Gov Workshop sponsored by the Center for American Progress -- July 2010. A short, extemporaneous talk I gave at Carl Malamud's Law.Gov workshop held at the Center for American Progress on June 15, 2010. I talk about what government can learn from computer platforms, how law is like the specification for a program, how debugging is the art of finding out what you really told your program to do rather than what you thought it would do, and how we need a similar practice to debug our laws. We must understand their effects, not just our intentions. One great aid to that is the work that Carl is doing to make the full text of all laws available to scholars, to students, and to the public. Much as open source software provides a great opportunity to learn how software works by studying the source code, how can we have a working democracy in which citizens can't even see the rules of the programs that guide our government. By the way, that's Vint Cerf saying "Wow, that's a headful of thought." at the end. CBS interview with Shira Lazar -- July 2010. In this CBS interview with Shira Lazar, I talk about how government can be a vehicle for innovation. By making data available and sharing applications among cities, there are some great possibilities emerging. "There are opportunities for cities to actually work together." Portland Oregon CivicApps Awards Ceremony -- July 2010. In this short video clip (I appear twice: briefly at the beginning and then closer to the end), I make the connection between Open Source, Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0. C-Span at Gov 2.0 Expo -- July 2010. In this interview with C-Span at this year's Gov 2.0 Expo I explain in depth what I mean by the term Gov 2.0 and offer insights into how some of the applications could affect health care in particular. Live Video Chat with Inc. Magazine Readers -- May 2010. This webcast covered many of the same issues as the Inc. Magazine profile, but also topical issues such as Facebook privacy. Inc. did something very clever, breaking the hour-long video into short, topical chunks. Here's one of them, in which I comment on the idea of work-life balance and the pursuit of profits vs. the pursuit of passion and meaning. I said "They don't need to be balanced, they need to be integrated."
The other short segments include:
The Oracle of Silicon Valley -- The (Tim) O'Reilly Factor -- May 2010. Publishers' Weekly interviewed me recently about the Tools of Change (ToC) conference in New York in February, 2010. This interview covers my views of the publishing industry, particularly ebooks, the devices, and the big three competing in this arena: Google, Apple, and Amazon. "When you have a new market, it takes a while for the economic engines of it to become clear... But we already have a real economy of ebooks. Are there tradeoffs? Yes. There is some piracy, of course. But I look also at the opportunities. More than 60% of our e-book sales come from countries where we have no physical book distribution, so we have this huge expansion of our market as a result of e-books." "That's part of our vision with ToC, to get publishers together to share what works. That's why we spend a lot of time evangelizing the idea that it's important for publishers to share data, to tell their stories, talk about innovations that work, and to be challenged." In a more direct way, my presentation at the ToC conference itself covers the challenges of publishers in the digital era. What do publishers need to be really good at? "I'm not saying not to be creative and innovative, but a lot of what you do (for authors) is the boring stuff. You need to be really good at production, distribution, pricing, channel management, marketing, and sales." This is one of the reasons I give for why I think that there will always be publishers. Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists -- April 2010. Steven Levy's review of hacker culture, on the occasion of the 25th re-release of his seminal book Hackers. Steven kindly includes me among the luminaries he discusses (even though I wasn't in the original book). MySQL Conference 2010: Keynote Address: The Internet of Things -- April 2010. The future of data and open source: Where is it taking us in the age of the cloud? "The future is inconceivable and we need to get our brains around that future... we haven't seen far enough into the future. At O'Reilly we try to find the people who are living in the future already." "The data itself is becoming the source of building new applications... (The future is) real time cloud based intelligence delivered to mobile apps. Build for the data based world that you can see coming." The following two posts are the ones I mention in the address above.The State of the Internet Operating System -- March 2010. Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet? I've been talking for years about "the internet operating system", but I realized I've never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars -- April 2010. As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system. The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from multiple providers horizontally integrated via open standards. Twitter as a Force for Good -- April, 2010. At the Twitter Chirp Conference, I lead a panel discussion with Katie Stanton from the State Department, Patrick Meier from Ushahidi, and Anil Dash from Expert Labs. We talk about how government can use technology for addressing policy issues and even manage international crises, as was done brilliantly in Haiti. "I hope their stories will inspire you to think not just about whether you can make money... but about whether you can make a difference." Location Debate at Where 2.0 2010 -- Mike Arrington and I chat, and though the location debate never occurs, we cover some interesting topics. "We both agree that competition is good for people.... (But) If you go head on at a very strong opponent you are going to lose... attack where you can be strong." Mike, as a reporter, however, likes to watch the giants going at each other. Chris Vein and Tim O'Reilly on City Data -- March 2010. Chris Vein discusses with me how releasing data to the public has generated new applications. The city of San Francisco hopes to see this kind of synergy in six key areas: Transportation, Crime, Public Safety, Commerce, Health, and Recreation & Parks. "There is an incredible rich store of data that we have never looked at before... we are releasing that data to the public. From that release, we have seen about 30 applications... that we don't have the money to develop." Six Years in the Valley -- March 2010. This interview with the Economist at their Innovation event in Berkeley, March 2010, covers the origins of the Web 2.0 Conference, the rise of advertising as a business model, and the core lesson of Web 2.0: that users add value. I talk about lessons from Google, the idea of applications that get better the more people use them, and what that means for the future of the web. A particularly interesting moment came when the Economist asked me why there were so few big Web 2.0 successes. "It's too early to tell... Roll back the clock to the 80s, when there were hundreds if not thousands of personal computer software companies. And most of them failed. Would you say that there was a paradox in the software industry business model because most companies were not able to actually become successful?" The Future of Face Recognition -- March 2010. Moritz Metz interviews me about Google Goggles, Face recognition, the future of AR and post privacy. "I think a lot of this (face recognition) is going to become commonplace... Social apps is a huge repository of data collected online. We are going to find new uses for it... and we'll get used to it." Open Source: Education as a Platform -- January 2010. I discuss the University as an open source platform: What are the possibilities? "When choice is brought to the marketplace, exciting things can happen." Cloud computing Explained: An interview with Tim O'Reilly -- January 2010. I explain cloud computing and it's interconnection with mobile computing, and how this ultimately connects to government data and crucial policy decisions that enable the future. "There are a lot of unchartered waters where everything is accessible to everyone. But I think that there are more benefits than risks." C-Span at Gov 2.0 Summit -- November 2009. I was interviewed by C-Span at our Gov 2.0 Summit. I appear at the beginning of this video, followed by Jack Dempsey, co founder of Twitter, and others. I explain what Gov 2.0 is all about: how thinking as a platform provider can bring services to citizens using government data and the creative power of the private sector. TechCrunch50 Interview -- September 2009. I was interviewed after the morning's panel discussion and was asked why I was critical of some companies and what I liked about others. "I like the companies that are looking toward where technology is going. They are pursuing a future that will help us build better tools. Even if they fail, the interesting startups still leave the soil richer." FORA.tv Interview -- April 2009. In this interview by Blaise Zerega, president and CEO of FORA.tv, we talk about the origins of the term and the meaning of Web 2.0; the development of the internet as a platform; what amazon and google got right; how twitter has added real time to the internet; why I think RFID is an evolutionary deadened; what publishers can learn from software developers; why I did not take venture capital even early on in the life of my company; and my view of collective consciousness as part of human evolution. "Although there is much about human beings that is the same, there are significant changes occurring as we respond to increasingly global and automatic connections that are a direct result of technology." Interview with IBM's developerworks -- October 2008. I tell the O'Reilly Media story: its focus on innovators in the field, growth, goals for the future. "First of all, our basic methodology, as we've developed it over the years sort of through trial and error, is that we find interesting people who are innovating from the edge. And then we just watch and see what they do. So, for example, we have an event called foo camp... we invite these guys together with no program, and on the Friday night, they introduce themselves and then there's a bunch of big whiteboards with space for talks, and they put up the talks that they want to give. And we watch that and we say, 'Wow -- what are they wanting to talk about?'" |
Tim's Radar Blog Posts
More on O'Reilly Radar Follow Tim on Twitter
More on Twitter Archive of Interviews/ArticlesOrganized 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.
Tim's BestThis is the list I came up with when asked by Computerworld for my favorite posts. It's always Ada Lovelace Day at O'Reilly (Mar 2009) Why I support Barack Obama (Oct 2008) Pascal's Wager and Climate Change (Jan 2009) The Change We Need: DIY on a Civic Scale (Apr 2009) Why I love Twitter (Nov 2008) Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again (Dec 2006) Some pieces on Web 2.0 and the enterprise: What would Google do? (May 2007) Why Dell.com (was) More Enterprise 2.0 Than Dell IdeaStorm (Sep 2008) Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com: The Power of the Real Time Enterprise (Dec 2008) My Tongue-Lashing from Eben Moglen (Aug 2007) Why I love hackers (May 2008), video clip Piracy is Progressive Taxation , and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution (Dec 2002) The Open Source Paradigm Shift (June 2004)
What is Web 2.0? (Sept 2005) The Publishing Point Interviews
Part 1: My original business model for my company was a one liner: "interesting work for interesting people". At some point I realized that what we were really doing was changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. That became then our mission. So publishers need to think about what job they do in the world. Part 2: What is necessary for a publisher is to answer the question: what do you really do? It's not just about putting words on paper and binding them. Some outgrowths of publishing are natural, like seminars if you are a business book publisher. An important motto for us at O'Reilly is "create more value than you capture." Part 3: What are the hard things that publishers do? It's not about picking out what's best or who is the best author. Publishers haven't always done that well! At O'Reilly we just try to focus on what matters, on what people need to know about. The real questions are more about reaching the consumer—how to do that in fact—and what is the right "form" that is going to get people excited. Part 4: Why do people read? Is it to pass the time, to escape, to become informed, to change one's viewpoint? How a publisher answers these question may determine what will get published. On the practical side, one of the more important and urgent questions is what is the right price to sell the greatest number of books, particularly e-books. Part 5: More on e-books and the future: It's more important to care about something other than the preservation of one's company. The people who are lit up by the future are going to be pursuing that future. There could be some really interesting innovations around book clubs or social reading. One of the big challenges or risks for a new company is to be willing to take things that others might throw away. Part 6: What is quality? This is a hard question to answer in the industry. The role of libraries is discussed in response to a question from the audience as well as what a library might look like in the future. The most compelling thing I find in a print book is when it is beautiful. Part 7: We should be trying hard to grow the digital aspect of publishing and looking for new business models to do that. The good news is that this electronic ecology is going to get better. |
In this series of videos, Michael Healy interviews me at The Publishing Point in New York, September 29, 2010.Popular Topics
| JavaScript | iPhone |
| Android | Python |
| HTML5 & CSS | Head First |
| jQuery | Java |
| iPad | PHP |
| Perl | Linux |
Browse Books & Videos
- Apple & Mac
- Business & Culture
- Certification & Training
- Databases
- Design & Graphics
- Digital Audio & Video
- Digital Photography
- Hardware
- Home & Office
- Microsoft
- Mobile & Smart Devices
- Networking & Sys Admin
- Operating Systems
- Programming
- Science & Math
- Security
- Software Engineering
- Web Development
International Sites
©2011, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (707) 827-7000 / (800) 998-9938 All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. |
|