Scott Berkun, bestselling author of The Myths of Innovation, gets requests to speak and write for folks all around the globe. Recently, Alexandra M. Abboud (according to Scott the “coolest government employee” around), asked Scott to write an essay called How to Innovate Right Now for the newly launched America.gov website.
And over at the Berkun Blog, Scott now reveals that on Feb. 5–aka Super Tuesday–anyone can sign in live and ask him questions. Scott explains:
“As a kicker, they run a monthly live webchat: anyone can sign in live and ask me questions.
Go to the Ask America website on Tuesday Feb 5th, 12pm EST. (The site currently says 9am EST, but it will be updated soon).
If you’ve got a question you’ve always wanted me to answer, now’s your chance.
And if you can’t make it, leave a question in the comments. That way when no one shows up in the live webchat, I’ll have something to do.”
Let us know what you ask Scott!
John Broughton recently sat down to answer some questions for us about his new book, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. While I’m sure most people find navigating Wikipedia to be quite a simple task, editing it can be rather confusing.
John discovered this as he began working deeper in the online encyclopedia:
In November 2006 I started working on an index for editors of Wikipedia - a single page that had links to all relevant policies, guidelines, how-to pages, reference pages, tools, and other things that an editor might conceivably want to read. The more I worked on the index, the more I discovered of the complexity of editing Wikipedia. As the index developed, I realized that I had the basis for the book. I also realized, given how incredibly complex Wikipedia is, why there hadn’t yet been a book about editing Wikipedia?
His book comes out at an exceptionally pivotal time in Wikipedia’s short history.
Wikipedia is immensely popular as a source of information. But it needs many more active editors than it has now, because it is so incomplete. It also needs many more editors who are experts in a particular subject matter. This book helps such potential editors avoid a lot of the mistakes that newcomers make, and shows them how to deal with various situations as they are encountered.
Michael Morrison is a writer, developer, toy inventor, and the author of a variety of books covering topics such as Java, Web scripting, game development, and mobile devices. His latest book, Head First JavaScript already has a growing fan base, typical of the Head First books. I managed to grab a few minutes out of Michael’s busy schedule recently to get him to say what drove him to write this book.
Q. So, Michael, why Head First and why JavaScript?
In all honesty, I wanted to be a part of the Head First series, and JavaScript seemed to be the perfect technology to teach via Head First. It’s just such an innovative approach to learning, and I really thought I had something unique to contribute–a unique way of looking at technology through the lens of everyday things.
I long ago gave up on ever becoming a cover girl. Yet, without any effort on my part, there’s my face on the cover of Facebook: The Missing Manual. And now I’m walking around feeling like I won the lottery. In fact, my image shares cover real estate with the charming visages of several of my colleagues here at O’Reilly (along with the wagging little white dog).
Of course, my friends and family can expect their copies of our newest Missing Manual soon. In this case, I’m explaining, they can judge a book by its cover. Yet there’s plenty to read and digest between the covers of Facebook: The Missing Manual. Readers will find a witty, practical guide to unlocking everything Facebook can do.
Recently I asked E.A. (Emily) Vander Veer why Facebook: The Missing Manual is especially important now.
Emily: Facebook is receiving a tremendous amount of consumer/popular press right now, for everything from its outrageous $15 billion valuation, to the “Big Brother” charges leveled at its recently announced Beacon feature, to security issues (”social worms”). Facebook’s skyrocketing membership and recently inked deal with ABC News’ (political reporting/feedback app) have pushed Facebook–otherwise known as “MySpace for grown-ups”–onto headlines from the NYTimes to Newsweek.
Facebook is also receiving a tremendous amount of attention–and rightly so–as being on the forefront of the Web 2.0 trend of social networking software. Some scientists are positing that Facebook (and sites like it) aren’t just online models of the way we socialize, but actually reflect how the majority of personal interactions will be conducted in the future.
Co-produced by Ruby Central and O’Reilly Media, RailsConf is “the” event for the growing Rails Community–the largest official gathering dedicated to everything Rails. If you’re passionate about Rails and what it helps you achieve–or if you’re curious about how Rails can help you create web applications better and faster–this conference is the place to be.
Happy 50th birthday to… the LEGO brick. I’ve missed it by a few hours, as the official birthday was at 1:58pm this afternoon, but all the same, it is a very momentous occasion. Gizmodo posted a lovely timeline of LEGO constructions, from the inventing of the LEGO wheel to the first LEGO Pirates set.
Along with the timeline is a list of “curiosities” about the LEGO brick. Check out the rest of the article here.
That passion is what led software engineer Damon Clinkscales to start the Austin on Rails users group two years ago, when the technology had little more than a small cult following.
“The idea was to get people together and talk about what we were learning,” said Clinkscales, who works in Austin for Raleigh, N.C.-based Vital Source Technologies. “Eventually it started really catching on, and companies started using Rails and coming in to show us what they’ve done.”
At the recent meeting, which included a speaker from Sun Microsystems Inc. touting its coding tool for Rails, Clinkscales asked for a show of hands: How many attendees worked for companies that are hiring Rails programmers? How many were Rails programmers looking for jobs?
Eight had positions to fill, and four were looking.
“That’s kind of the story right now,” Clinkscales told them. “There are more jobs than there are Rails people.”
After the meeting, the group headed to B.D. Riley’s Irish Pub on Sixth Street to continue the Rails conversation over pints of Fireman’s #4 beer.
“What happens after the official meeting is the most important part,” Clinkscales said. “It’s where you make contacts that lead to new ideas, new projects and new friendships.”
If you’re looking to improve your Rails skills don’t forget our new book Advanced Rails.
Sure, Derrick Story, our Digital Media Evangelist and co-author of iPhoto ‘08: The Missing Manual, is in a swoon over his iPhone. But, still, like with most great loves, he’s begun to feel something is missing. Here he tells you what he wants (meta data) and why.
Learn what David Pogue feels is missing in Leopard, and what J.D. Biersdorfer thinks is missing in her iPod over at the Missing Manual Missing Feature series. That’s also where you can tell us what you wish your favorite software or gadgets could do. Surely, something is missing.
The 2008 MountainWest RubyConf is a two-day conference being held March 28th and 29th in Salt Lake City, UT and focusing on Ruby and Rails. Speakers are drawn from among the best and brightest hackers working in the community, with topics like: “Faster, Better, ORM with DataMapper,” “Domain Specific Languages: Molding Ruby,” and “Using Amazon’s Web Services from Ruby.”
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are shaping the Web today. Love them or hate them, if you’re working on the Web, you’ll want to understand them. And now, Adobe and O’Reilly have teamed up to develop, InsideRIA.com. It’s the premiere community site for all things RIA, created specifically for web developers, architects, programmers, designers, or anyone else who makes the Web their business.
“Our goal is to create an invaluable resource for information on the ever-changing state of design and RIAs.” says Steve Weiss, executive editor at O’Reilly Media. “We’ve started with general topic areas on Design, Development, and Standards, which will feature blog posts and multimedia content.”
The new online community brings some of the leading members of the RIA community together, including lead blogger, Andre Charland, and InsideRIA community manager, Rich Tretola.
I was reminded of the Web 1.0 reality when Jakob Nielsen recently published an article entitled Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous…. This provocative piece comes at the Web 2.0 age in a different way than I am used to. In the article, Nielsen covers four elements of Web 2.0: Rich Internet Applications, User-Generated Content, Mashups, and an Advertising Based Business Model. I am going to be examining his arguments around the first element, Rich Internet Applications. Fellow blogger Tony MacDonell discussed this article from a design perspective, but I wanted to look at it from a developer’s perspective.
We hope you visit InsideRIA.com soon. Everyone is encouraged to engage in an ongoing narrative about where RIA technology is headed. And we’d love for you to join the discussion and offer your opinions and comments.
InfoQ is offering an excerpt from Nicolai Josutti’s new title, SOA in Practice. You can download the pdf of Chapter 12, “Versioning” from their site.
InfoQ’s Stefan Tilkov also had a chance to sit down with Nicolai to ask about his views on SOA, the main industry misconceptions about it, and key success factors for SOA. Few people understand the practical aspects of SOA in the enterprise as well as Nicolai does, so the interview is well worth a read. For instance, Stefan asks, What are the main misconceptions you see in the industry about SOA? to which Nicolai replies, There are several things wrong with the way the SOA movement is handled these days. But he doesn’t just list the problems, Nicolai explains what is needed to fix the situation. He also touches on the main challenges with SOA and the key success factors.
SOA is unquestionably a subject that many people find daunting. If you’d like to win a free copy of Nicolai’s book, post a comment to this blog to let us know what you think about SOA or some of the challenges you’ve faced with it. You can even post a question for Nicolai and we’ll see what he has to say. Just post by the end of the day on January 26. We’ll select a winner in our totally arbitrary fashion from among the comments and send a copy of SOA in Practice. It could be the answer to your SOA woes.
Folks are often interested when they learn I work for O’Reilly Media. But few people have expressed as much enthusiasm as Julio, a new friend I met recently at a party in Occidental, a tiny redwood studded town a few miles west of O’Reilly Media’s headquarters in Sebastopol.
“I told my wife that I wanted to drive through Sebastopol so I could see where Mr. O’Reilly worked,” Julio told me. A Cuban by birth and now a Canadian citizen by choice, Julio told me he was among the handful of computer pioneers who constructed the Cuban Internet. And they did it with the help of O’Reilly’s animal books.
Over the course of Cuba’s Internet revolution, Julio dramatically changed his life, leaving his native land as a political refugee and heading for Canada. Today he works as an independent software consultant.
I asked Julio to tell me more about how O’Reilly helped him and others develop the Internet in Cuba and this is what he emailed me:
The history of the build out of the Cuban Internet is curiously intertwined with O’Reilly Books. Surprised? Read on.
4th Annual South Florida Code Camp offers something for everyone…from the person who is new to .NET to advanced architecture and software process sessions. For the second year they will have an all Spanish track. Dedicated tracks include “Into to .NET,” “Silverlight,” and “Agile / CI.” Sessions include Ajax, MVC, Visual Studio 2008, Powershell, Windows Workflow, and .NET reflection.
The crowds at MacWorld are thriving this week as exciting keynotes are attended, sales are taken advantage of, and new connections are made. Here are a few pictures from our booth:
Customers enjoying the variety of books available for sale at the booth.
One of the nice things about taking public transportation in to work is noting what other people are reading (surreptitiously, of course). Last night I spotted a fellow BART rider reading one of my favorite O’Reilly books, Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli. In recent weeks, I’ve also seen people reading Head Rush Ajax, Learning Python, and JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. Just as an aside, these have all been men; the only woman I’ve been aware of reading an O’Reilly book on BART has been me.
We spent yesterday putting the O’Reilly booth (S-2218) together. And now we’re ready. If you’re attending Macworld, we hope you stop by!
For information about our digital photography events and author presentations, including times, location, and contact information, check out O’Reilly’s Macworld page: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/mwsf/
We’re getting better and better at collecting data, but lagging behind in what we can do with it. So says Ben Fry, author of the fascinating new title, Visualizing Data. “This is the greatest challenge of our information-rich era,” he says. “We’re getting so good at measuring and recording things, why haven’t we kept up with the methods to understand and communicate this information?”
Ben points out that we do very little thinking about information itself. We also tend to think of it in terms of fixed values to be analyzed, rather than see it as the moving target it is. We’re often completely unclear on what we hope to extract from it, even why we collected it to begin with. Fortunately, however, Ben’s book shows how to grapple with large, complex data sets, laying out the seven steps of visualizing data (acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact) as well as introducing readers to the tools they need to work with data. These are necessary skills for anyone who hopes to communicate effectively.
What kinds of data do you need to understand and share? What are the challenges you face in dealing with it? Post a comment to this blog by Tuesday, Jan. 15, and we’ll select a winner (arbitrarily, of course) to receive a free copy of Ben’s book.
The winner of the bash Cookbook last month was Mel Lester, Jr. who wrote: We have a small, 40 year old business with multiple locations. Through the magic of broadband and Open Source, we have enjoyed access to technology previously only available to mega corporations. Bash is ubiquitious - there are even versions for Windows! If my bash scripting skills were to improve, I would use bash to set up and monitor secure IPsec tunnels between our various offices in addition to automating cross site backups and disaster recorvery.
Thanks, Mel. I know the cookbook will serve you well.
We’re joining some 400 exhibitors and the expected 50,000 conference goers in San Francisco’s Moscone Center (Jan. 15 to 18).
Highlights at the O’Reilly booth (S-2218) will include a dynamic lineup of entertaining talks and timely new Mac and digital media titles to browse during the conference. Indeed, there’s something for every Mac addict to love.
Buzz is already building over David Pogue’s upcoming appearances at the O’Reilly booth on Jan. 16 and 17 at 1 p.m. At present, David’s new book, “Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual” (O’Reilly, $34.99), tops Amazon’s bestseller charts. And during his talk, David–the New York Times tech columnist, creator of O’Reilly’s Missing Manual series, and magician–will use his wit and showmanship to demonstrate his expert Leopard tips and tricks.
Yet there are many more reasons to love visiting the O’Reilly booth and sponsored events during Macworld:
- Because on Jan. 13 Derrick Story will lead an “Ask the Experts” panel discussion that features leading digital photographers (Mikkel Aaland, Harold Davis, and Rick Smolan) talking about their craft at a pre-Macworld event at 7:00 p.m. Book Passage in Corte Madera.
The first 250 people arriving receive a valuable reusable “goodie” bag Mission Bay Conference Center–UCSF
1675 Owens Street
San Francisco, CA 94158
The doors open at 5 pm, show starts at 6:30 pm ends at 10 pm
In a gorgeous new book from renowned photographers Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggan, they defy this “digital darkroom” oxymoron and talk about the darkroom experience in the digital era. This book goes beyond using particular programs or simple “how-to” instructions, but offers many examples which teach photographers to fully use the digital medium to create, edit, and output images that reflect their true vision.
Chris Sells says he loves what the Albahari brothers (Joe & Ben) have done with their new book C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, and it’s not just their prose he praises but a nifty tool for learning LINQ that they call LINQPad:
I have learned a bunch of stuff about LINQ I didn’t know, they built a tool (LINQPad) that lets you experiment with LINQ interactively in a way that the designers of LINQ themselves don’t support and the tool has all kinds of wonderful features that LINQ, SQL and Regular Expression programmers alike will want to use regularly long after they’ve read the book.
And if that weren’t enough, the tool comes with an integrated tree of samples that follow along with the material in the book, teaching the material from another angle and reinforcing it perfectly. It’s pure genius and if I ever write another book, it’s a model I’m going to follow. Very highly recommended.”
Jude Biersdorfer, author of, iPod: The Missing Manual, joins Chuck Joiner on “The Road to Macworld Expo” to discuss what’s new in iPod-land, and her presentation “Filling Your iPod with Free Video,” in the O’Reilly Booth at the show. Jude talks about why an iPod touch and a Wi-Fi connection means you’ll never run out of content, her favorite way to move DVDs to the iPod, and why you may want to consider manually updates if you have multiple iPods. Got a new iPod for the holidays? Jude discusses and the first things you should do and why the packaging deserves special attention.
to speak and write for folks all around the globe. Recently, Alexandra M. Abboud (according to Scott the “coolest government employee” around), asked Scott to write an essay called How to Innovate Right Now for the newly launched America.gov website. 
Michael Morrison is a writer, developer, toy inventor, and the author of a variety of books covering topics such as Java, Web scripting, game development, and mobile devices. His latest book, 
Facebook is also receiving a tremendous amount of attention–and rightly so–as being on the forefront of the Web 2.0 trend of social networking software. Some scientists are positing that Facebook (and sites like it) aren’t just online models of the way we socialize, but actually reflect how the majority of personal interactions will be conducted in the future.
One of the nice things about taking public transportation in to work is noting what other people are reading (surreptitiously, of course). Last night I spotted a fellow BART rider reading one of my favorite O’Reilly books, 
Ben points out that we do very little thinking about information itself. We also tend to think of it in terms of fixed values to be analyzed, rather than see it as the moving target it is. We’re often completely unclear on what we hope to extract from it, even why we collected it to begin with. Fortunately, however, Ben’s book shows how to grapple with large, complex data sets, laying out the seven steps of visualizing data (acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact) as well as introducing readers to the tools they need to work with data. These are necessary skills for anyone who hopes to communicate effectively.
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