Tim O’Reilly, Richard Scoble, Mitchell Baker, and seven other leading figures in the Web community talked to the BBC recently about their hopes for the future of the web.

Tim O’Reilly:

We created the first commercial website with a special dispensation from the National Science Foundation. We were interested in online publishing and we were thinking of how to get books online and then the web came along and we thought: ‘Oh my god this is the answer to our prayers’.

The web was this promise of a universal platform for information and it was just transformative and so exciting to see that potential come into play.

The fact that Tim Berners-Lee gave it away was so critical to that. l imagine if someone tried to commercialise it, maybe it would have taken off but that was what Microsoft and AOL tried to do.

Free is such a powerful force in innovation.

Read the read the rest of Tim’s interview and the other nine interviews here.

What makes millions of people build an encyclopedia for free? How can you make Wikipedia better and contribute to the world of free knowledge? Visit with the makers, the hackers, and the volunteers of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia at Maker Faire this weekend and find out. Makers are invited to get a hands-on tutorial for wiki editing, upload photos from the event for creative commons distribution, and help create the Maker Faire entry on Wikipedia.

“This is the Wikimedia Foundation’s first major public event of this sort,” explained Jay Walsh, who heads up communications for the WikimediaFoundation.org. “We’ve been involved in our own, volunteer-powered conferences in the past, including the Wikimania Conference, this year in Alexandria Egypt.”

At the Wikimedia Foundation/Wikipedia booth you’ll find a terrific giveaway, the “Wikipedia Reader’s Guide: The Missing Manual” by registered Wikipedia editor John Broughton. The giveaway from O’Reilly’s Missing Manual division can help you get started on your Maker Faire entry.

So be sure to stop by Booth 108 Expo Hall to meet Wikipedia volunteers and members of the Missing Manual team. I’ll be at Maker Faire, too, helping out with PR. I hope to see you there!

Maker Faire is May 3 & 4 at the San Mateo County Fairgounds. Find more info here.

A couple weeks ago, Jonathan Zdziarski presented a fascinating webcast on iPhone Forensics. He geared the presentation towards law enforcement professionals—specifically, forensic investigators—but even I, with no background even remotely in law enforcement, found the presentation rivetting. And now I know that if you’re a criminal, you’ll want to keep your iPhone close to you: it can reveal a lot more than you imagine.

But for the non-criminals among us—and those who go after the bad guys—Jonathan has done some amazing work, including the creation of a toolkit and detailed iPhone forensics manual that he provides free of charge to law enforcement pros. He tells how to get it in his webcast.

If you missed the webcast, you can download the recording now and watch it on your computer. It’s a 200 MB .mov file, which means it takes a long time to download. If you click on the link, it will load into QuickTime in your browser window and take about 10 minutes before it begins to play with a good Internet connection. You can also right-click on the link to download the file to your computer and then watch it at your leisure.

iPhone Forensics Demonstration by Jonathan Zdziarski

http://cachefly.oreilly.com/oreilly/videos/oreilly-iphone-forensics.mov

Or, check out the YouTube Trailer

The YouTube version only contains the first 10 minutes of the webcast. It’ll give you a taste of what it’s like, if you’re not sure you want to download and watch the whole thing.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, we launched O’Reilly InPractice. Our new consulting and training division aims to help companies reposition themselves and thrive in a user-centered economy. Here KRON 4’s Brian Shields talks with George LeBrun, chief strategy officer/general manager of O’Reilly InPractice, and Joshua Ross, vp of the new division, about what they’re up to.

Passing along a reminder from Josh McAdams of Perlcast:

YAPC –yet another Perl conference–takes place June 16th-18th on the campus of Illinois Institute of Technology. It is an inexpensive ($100 US for 3 days) conference with its roots in the Perl Mongers Perl users groups.

But the early bird price ends at the end of April so don’t wait to sign up.

Inspired by a slide in Christian Crumlish’s presentation on Graphing Social Patterns, I thought I would nudge you to discuss the Ignite event last night — a great gathering for those attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Topics ranged from giant monsters and journalism tactics to running a marathon and online voting. Vinnie Lauria talked about how to use your users to make a better website–specifically highlighting interns–which immediately reminded me of our Hackerteen helper Dylan (see Making Connections With Hackerteen).

Still another presenter - David Calkins - deferred to robots and their amazing abilities to help around the house, entertain, and in general make our lives easier.

Fritz Nelson referred to the event in his blog entry entitled It’s Simple, But Not Easy” on InformationWeek this morning, acknowledging that while the presentations appeared to be simple, they were in fact, extremely difficult to put together with the given constraints. But as James Levy (left) demonstrated, anything simple can be done well with enough notes and a good audience.

In general, it was a night for fun, for networking, for interacting with fellow geeks, and for seeing how the minds of geeks work when restricted to 5 minutes and 20 slides that rotate every 15 seconds. So, cheers to those who succeeded at the task, and best of luck to those who try to tackle the challenge in the future. If you’re interested in trying out an Ignite of your own, check out ignite.oreilly.com, or email ignite@oreilly.com for more information.

all photos compliments of Steve Rhodes

keep an eye out for more for more photos and videos from Ignite! Web 2.0 Expo SF on ignite.oreilly.com

When Google lifted traditional office applications into its “cloud” of fast network connections, powerful servers, and seemingly limitless storage, it changed the way many of us create, organize, and share information. And, as Press Democrat reporter Nathan Halverson noted in a recent story, these free new computer applications help keep costs down.

“Unlike traditional software that is installed on your computer, these new programs run over the Internet,” Halverson wrote. “That means no installation discs, and no worrying if your computer has enough memory. If your computer can run a Web browser such as Internet Explorer, it can run these applications.”

And for those hoping to get the most out of Google Apps, German native Philipp Lenssen offers timely guidance. In his new book–“Google Apps Hacks”–Philipp explains that working in the cloud offers a whole lot more than simply the freedom from desktop software. With Google Apps, collaborating with others near and far becomes much easier and more fun. I talked to Philipp recently about his approach to writing “Google Apps Hacks.” (Read to the end of the interview for info about how to win Philipp’s new book!)
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SP: Why did you write “Google Apps Hacks?”

I have a great interest in Google’s approaches and tools. In 2003 I started covering them nearly daily for the weblog, Google Blogoscoped, which also kind of led to my writing the book, “55 Ways to Have Fun With Google.” When O’Reilly contacted me for a new book project covering the Google tools, I didn’t really have to think twice. It sounded like great fun–and a year afterwards I know it was indeed great fun.

From Jeremy Fluhmann, San Angelo Perl Mongers:

The Open Source Symposium is an inexpensive one-day conference offering talks on various aspects of open source, such as software, development, and best practices. Some talk topics include Perl, Python, Ubuntu, LAMP, version control, and contributing to open source. Through the generosity of our sponsors and open source community members, we are able to keep attendance costs low and event quality high.

The symposium gives attendees the opportunity to mingle with open source users and notable contributors to the open source community. Many of which are local to Texas. The 2008 Open Source Symposium will be held Saturday, April 26, at the C J Davidson Conference Center located on the Angelo State University campus.

For more information on Perl user groups, check out the Perl Mongers.

From Jason N. Gaylord, .NET Valley President:

Join an estimated 300 Developers, IT Professionals, CIO’s and Industry Experts from Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and host-state, Pennsylvania. TECHbash brings together a broad spectrum of Technology Professionals to network, knowledge share and discuss existing technology solutions to business challenges, as well as preview pre-release products on the bleeding edge.

This year, they’ve expanded to three tracks offering more presentations and providing more content choices. The event opens with a keynote presentation Joe Stagner, Program Manager for Microsoft’s Web Tools and Platform Division.

.NET Valley is one of the many user groups in O’Reilly’s UG Program.

Congratulations to George LeBrun, who takes the reins of a newly launched O’Reilly division–O’Reilly InPractice. This new consulting and training division, announced today at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, aims to help companies intelligently and successfully reposition themselves in the global network—and thrive in a user-centered economy. And George, a top media and communications authority and now Chief Strategy Officer/General Manager of O’Reilly InPractice, is already working with companies to help them deliver positive experiences for their customers by applying transformative Web 2.0 tactics.

This week George and his team are in San Francisco attending Web 2.0 Expo. But before George headed off, I got a chance to talk to him about his career and why he’s excited about leading O’Reilly InPractice.

SP: George, tell me a little about yourself, and your family, and what your life is like in Texas.

I’ve spent the last 25 years in the world of media and entertainment. I moved to San Antonio about 8 years ago when I was the CEO of an ISP called Vox4. I live there with my wife Deanna and daughter Alexandra (who is 12). We love the people and life in San Antonio. My daughter is a very gifted swimmer and I’m already hoping she will end up swimming for Stanford.

SP: You have a glamorous background as a Hollywood writer/director/producer. Who did you work with?

I was lucky to have mentors like Ed Zwick from Thirtysomething and Brian Grazer from Imagine Entertainment. They’re icons that were always very secure in their talent and creativity and weren’t afraid to share that with others.

SP: So as a Hollywood insider, how did you get involved in emerging technology?

When the word “interactive” was first bantered about, I got very interested in the marriage of content and technology. I moved from more traditional creative roles to more senior management roles and I have been focused there ever since.

SP: What excites you the most about heading up the O’Reilly InPractice team?

The economy that we’re moving deeper into now–which many call the experience economy, is truly revolutionary–not evolutionary. It will have more profound changes on how companies do business than any other economy in the last 100 years. So it’s a very interesting time to be working in this area right now. At my consulting company we were in the field operationalizing many of the Web 2.0 concepts with clients. I saw an opportunity to take what we were already doing and partner with O’Reilly to scale the business. O’Reilly has been spreading the knowledge of innovators for a long time and has built an amazing culture that Josh Ross and I are excited to be a part of.

SP: How did you meet Josh Ross and what will his role be?

I met Josh working on an engagement with Accenture. I immediately saw this brilliant guy who truly gets this space and understands that it’s really consumers that are driving this new economy. Although I run the group, Josh is a true partner in building the business from every perspective.

SP: What is one of the most significant effects of emerging trends & technologies?

In the last 30 months, they have brought about a significant power shift from companies to customers. Customers have more choices in products and services than at any other time in history. They have more information to make buying decisions and they are using each other as filters of trusted information more than any other time in history. The result is that they think and buy differently and their loyalties are changing. Today’s customers are looking for companies to be authentic and to deliver experiences through their products and services that trigger long-lasting meaning with them as a customer.

SP: If you could tell companies to do just one thing they need to do now to improve outreach to their customers, what would that be?

Become digitally literate about the Social Web. Companies need to move from having a group of experts in an area to a company wide fluency–in a new language if you will–that will help them become more participatory with their customers and employees.

Learn more about what George and Josh are up to at the O’Reilly InPractice website, inpractice.oreilly.com. And find more information about the O’Reilly InPractice launch from the press release.

Web 2.0 is one of those terms that average people find very slippery; that is, even when they’ve had it explained to them clearly, they find it difficult to turn around and explain to someone else. Of course, Tim O’Reilly gets it and can put it in easy-to-understand terms. And now Amy Shuen has written a guide for business people—any executive, manager, developer, entrepreneur, or investor who wants to thrive and survive in a hyper-networked Web 2.0 economy. It’s Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, and it’s available now.

“You’re already an integral part of the Web 2.0 business economy,” says Amy. “Every time you click on Google, Wikipedia, eBay, or Amazon, you are sparking ‘network effects.’ If you use a Flickr-enabled cell phone or tune in to iTunes podcasts or check Yahoo! Finance for stock quotes, you are creating monetizable value for businesses—even if you don’t actually buy anything.”

For those who want to be a Web 2.0 success, Amy offers her 5 Steps to Web 2.0:

1) Build on Collective User Value
2) Activate Network Effects
3) Work through Social Networks
4) Dynamically Syndicate Competencies
5) Recombine Innovations

If these steps sound a little cryptic, each one is covered in Chapter 6 of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide.

A chance to win a free copy of the book

Want to get your hands on a copy of the book? Post a comment to this blog to 1) share your biggest Web 2.0 challenge, 2) tell us about your greatest Web 2.0 success, or 3) take a stab at defining Web 2.0 in your own words.

Post before the end of the day on Tuesday, April 29th. I’ll select a winner (in a totally arbitrary fashion) and send that person a free copy of Amy’s book.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about Scott Berkun’s new book, Making Things Happen, and I asked people to post their ideas about what makes a good project manager. I said I’d arbitrarily select one winner from among those who posted and give away a free copy of Scott’s book.

Once again (it’s happened before) there were so many insightful posts that I’m having difficulty selecting a winner, even arbitrarily. So this time, I used a handy random number generator and selected ten winners from the bunch. I know I’m probably overlooking some brilliant and inspired responses, but there’s no way around it.

Here are the winning posts—oddly enough, they were all quite short! And I thank everyone who posted a comment. It was a fun discussion.

If you’re attending the Web 2.0 Expo this week, you’ll know that there are more sessions and activities going on than you could ever attend. There is one evening event that you don’t want to miss however — Ignite!

Ignite is known for their lightning talks — 5 minutes on stage with 20 slides that rotate automatically after 15 seconds. Geeks all over the world have been pulling together to participate, discovering what can be accomplished in this short amount of time, and one will be hosted at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco tomorrow night.

Join us as the doors open at 7pm and the talks begin at 8pm. For more information on the various talks and times, check out ignite.oreilly.com.

If you’re interested in starting an Ignite! in your area, check out the How To portion of the website for information about submitting your event, obtaining a logo for your event, and setting up a website to blog on as your event gets closer.

This week’s webcast is presented by Steve Souders, co-chair of Velocity and author of High Performance Web Sites. Steve will explain the Performance Golden Rule, review his performance best practices, and use YSlow to analyze the top web sites in the world. Introducing Steve will be Andy Oram, author, blogger, and senior editor for O’Reilly Media.

The webcast is live, free, and short enough to fit into your day without interrupting your busy schedule (approximately 45 minutes). Join us Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 10 am PT (17:00 GMT). Register today!

There’s a great amount of buzz in Sonoma County around Hackerteen right now — from teens to school officials to individuals at the county office of education — and a big thanks is owed to Dylan, one of our high school interns here at O’Reilly.

A junior at a local high school with a focus on technology, Dylan has been a great asset to our PR department, and has recently been doing some PR for “Hackerteen.” While at a robotics competition, he struck up a conversation with a local member of the Sonoma County Office of Education and arranged to give a presentation on “Hackerteen” at their symposium conference yesterday afternoon.

During his presentation Dylan explained the need for a book such as “Hackerteen,” which can help prevent teens from becoming “black hat hackers” (or hackers who use their knowledge to their advantage). He also went through some of the typical vulnerabilities in school network systems, and explained how the book, as well as the idea of mentoring young tech students, would be beneficial in our society. He then opened the floor up for questions from the tech heads of various schools. The questions included examples of network vulnerabilities, practical ways the book could be used, and advice on how to set up teacher/student mentoring programs for students to gain knowledge in tech areas.

Although “Hackerteen” and graphic novels invoke a new area for O’Reilly to be exploring, we’re very excited about the feedback we’ve gotten as well as the enthusiasm from the local school districts and administrators.

If you think “Hackerteen” could have an impact on your community in the same way or have any ideas on how “Hackerteen” could best be used in our communities and schools, leave a comment detailing your suggestions — I’ll send a free copy of the book to the first 10 people who respond!

Check out Hackerteen for yourself, and find out more information about the book from the press release. Be sure to pass along the information to your tech-centric teen friends as well. And keep an eye out for the next volume of Hackerteen to be released soon.

O’Reilly’s digital media evangelist Derrick Story got a chance recently to interview three of the four authors of a timely new book, “Subject to Change.” You’ll hear Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Peter Merholz talking with Derrick about how prosperous businesses can — and should — use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish. Click here to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Inside Digital Media Podcast Series via iTunes.

Jim Elferdink, author of “Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual,” fills us in on the coolest new features that Office for Windows can’t match. Here are some of the best:

Publishing Layout view. If you use Word to create formatted documents like letters and brochures, you’ll find it so much easier to do now in the new Publishing Layout view than in the old Page Layout view. Publishing Layout view is actually quite similar to Pages; both are very usable. It’s a huge boon for Word people—if you haven’t bought Pages, now you won’t have to!

MyDay. I really enjoy Entourage’s MyDay feature. Assuming you’re not working on a laptop that doesn’t have screen space to spare, I recommend keeping MyDay open in the corner of your screen. That’s what I do! It helps me keep track of my appointments and schedule. If you’ve got appointments every 20 minutes or just a lot going on in your day, it’s great to have it all at a glance. It also helps you remember to go pick up the kids. (And you can feel superior to your Windows friends. There’s nothing resembling MyDay in Office for Windows.)

You’ll find the rest of Jim’s reasons to upgrade here. And if you upgraded to Office 2008 for Mac, please tell us about your favorite new features. You just may receive a free book.

The Lightroom Adventure crew posted a new photo gallery. Lightroom Adventure Gallery 2 contains images taken mostly from Tasmania’s east coast.

View more images here. (Use the drop down menu when you get to the Gallery page to navigate to other galleries.)

With the iPhone quickly becoming the market leader in mobile devices, the need for law enforcement personnel to perform forensic analysis of these devices is beginning to surface. Join us on April 17th at 10 am Pacific Time, as Jonathan Zdziarski demonstrates how to install his custom forensics toolkit on any existing model iPhone and send a raw disk image to a desktop machine. He will also show you how to recover files specific to the iPhone including deleted keyboard caches, photos, web objects, and much more. Jonathan’s custom forensics toolkit and his accompanying forensic manual will be available free to forensic investigators in law enforcement. This live webcast is free. Register now and we’ll send you a reminder as the date draws near.

The web is full of opportunities for companies both large and small, but smaller companies face a difficult problem: infrastructure. Industrial-strength infrastructure can be costly to buy and maintain, so smaller companies often do without. “Yet in today’s world of web publicity flash storms caused by sites such as Slashdot and Digg, the difference between a web application serving a few dozen users and serving thousands may be no more than a glowing article and a few hours’ time,” notes author James Murty. “Although this kind of attention may be exactly what you hope for, unless you have invested heavily in infrastructure, your application may not survive the onslaught.”

A possible answer, according to James, comes in the form of Amazon’s infrastructure web services and his new book Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB explains how you can use Amazon’s massive computing infrastructure to build your own applications. AWS lets businesses and individuals “rent” computing power, data storage, and bandwidth on this vast network, and, best of all, you only pay for what you use.

Now you’re probably wondering, what kind of advice does James Murty have for people like me who might want to use AWS?. That’s a good question. Here’s what James has to say:

Jonathan Zdziarski’s live webcast last week was truly fascinating. He explained the process in detail from how to “jailbreak” your iPhone all the way through creating and installing an application on it, and he answered some thought-provoking questions along the way. You can download the movie and watch it if you missed out. It will take awhile to download as it is a one-hour long, 211 MB .mov file. With a good Internet connection, you should allow up to 10 minutes for downloading, but it’s definitely worth your time.

You can also view the ten-minute YouTube trailer if you want to get a sense of what the presentation is like. YouTube movies, of course, lack the resolution you need to see what’s on Jonathan’s screen. If you’re really interested in the topic, just go for the whole thing.

Other recent webcasts are available too:
Derrick Story: Five Ways to Make Your Photos Look Better, one hour, 196 MB .mov file
Carla Schroder: Control A World of Computers From Your Linux PC, 30 minutes, 125 MB .mov file
Joseph Albahari: Writing LINQ Queries with LINQPad, 43 minutes, 50 MB .mov file

Looking for some fun this weekend? Stop by LugRadio Live USA 2008 in San Francisco at the Metreon April 12-13. Tickets are only $10.00. O’Reilly will have a table along with many other exhibitors. Stop by and say hi.

LugRadio Live USA 2008
12th and 13th April 2008
The Metreon Theater, 101 4th St., San Francisco, CA, 94103

Watch this movie for last year’s event.

There may be something drier than the phrase “project management,” but usually it’s shaken and served with an olive. And while the latter is often greeted with some sense of anticipation, this is seldom the case with the former. In fact, the mention of project management all too often evokes a sense of weariness, unremitting work, frustration, even failure—feelings that are completely inconsistent with the fact that all successful projects depend on effective project management.

Scott Berkun is quick to tell you that it doesn’t need to be that way, and his latest book, Making Things Happen (formerly titled The Art of Project Management) will show you just what he means. Scott is a noted public speaker and teacher on management, creative thinking, and design. When I asked him what motivated him to write on project management, he said:

If you had to miss Derrick Story’s live webcast in late March—Five Ways to Make Your Photos Look Better—you’re still in luck. The video, complete with Derrick’s stunning photography and expert tips, is now available for downloading. Watch the YouTube trailer to see what it’s all about, or download the .mov file and view the entire presentation at leisure. The entire movie is one hour long, 196 MB. Be prepared for a long download time (7 minutes on my computer with a great connection) but it’s entirely worth the wait.

From Bill Wright, Bellingham Linux Users Group,:

LinuxFest Northwest is happening the 26th and 27th this month. LFNW is an international, technical event focused on Linux and Open Source software that attracts around 1 to 2 thousand attendees each year, the majority from Canada, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and California.

LinuxFest Northwest is a nonprofit organization that keeps the event admission free through fund raising and events like our “World Famous Raffle”

I remember the first time I realized that dragging something to the trash bin on a Mac meant the icon crumpled up and the object got “thrown away.” I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and made my friend show me over and over again.

Then I realized the animation that happened when you removed an object from the dock… and got excited all over again.

An upcoming book from Pragmatic Bookshelf entitled Core Animation for OS X deals with animations like these — ones that show movement and animate simple tasks such as deleting a file.

Author Bill Dudney recently did an interview with Daniel Steinberg regarding user interfaces on the iPhone and desktop, and how you can develop programs using core animation on the desktop and apply it directly to iPhone development.

Check it out on Pragmatic Programmer’s podcast website: www.pragprog.com/podcasts and stay tuned for more podcasts in the future.

And now for some Friday inspiration…

Many of us drag ourselves around and complain we feel 100 years or more when we’re much, much younger. But what would you do if you were lucky enough to enter triple digits. That’s the question San Francisco Bay Area native Gordon Miller faced. Gordon decided to celebrate 100 by going 100. He started off the morning by clocking 105 mph in his son’s Lexus. Than he raced a 36-foot Skater Cat 100-plus mph on the San Joaquin River in the hopes of becoming the fastest 100-year-old man on water. Indeed, one good feat deserves another.

Learn more at KTUV.com

Star photographers from across North America, Germany, Great Britain, and Australia–including O’Reilly authors Mikkel Aaland, Katrin Eismann, and Peter Krogh–are gathering in Tasmania to road test Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 beta. Tech journalist Leo Laporte weaves his report together with images from Aihara Masaaki, Bruce Dale, Jackie King, Peter, and Mikkel here.

Check out all the Tasmanian Adventure news at digitalmedia.oreilly.com/adventure/.