“The muffins are rolling.”

That’s the start to New York Times reporter John Schwartz terrific tale about his recent sojourn through Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. The frosted muffins are, of course, the electric-powered vehicles that look like they might have recently escaped from the latest Disney film.

Here’s more from Schwartz’s story:

Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, the company that publishes Make and Craft, said he felt echoes of the urge to transform tools and toys that he saw with the original personal-computer hobbyists in the 1970s and with the open-source software movement more recently. “We’ve ridden this wave before,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “We see hackers first, and then we see entrepreneurs and then we see it become part of the mainstream. And we’re still in that early hacker-enthusiast phase, but I’m really convinced that there is a manufacturing revolution on its way as part of what we’re seeing here.”

Which brings us back to the muffin cars. Keith Johnson and his daughter Karydis zip around the fairground in his cupcake-shaped runabout, which conceals a tiny electric all-terrain vehicle and the handlebars from a Hello Kitty bicycle. The “frosting” is sprinkled with oversize Prozac capsules. His head, and his baby’s, poke up out of a hole in the frosting.

His is one of more than a dozen cupcakes at the Faire. A founder of the cupcake makers group, Greg Solberg, is an engineer with Tesla Motors, a company that makes high-performance electric cars. Mr. Johnson is a specialist in preserving digital materials at Stanford University. The community of cupcake-car makers once rigged each car with speakers tied into an FM radio transmission system so they could all play the same music, whether the soundtrack from Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

You can read the rest of the story here. (A free sign-in may be required. ) You’ll also find terrific audible interviews with Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make magazine, Keith Johnson of Acme Muffineering, and more. Great photos, too.

Peter DeSilva for the New York Times

Boston is the hot place to be for in the next few weeks for geeks. With BarCamp Boston on the 17th and 18th, and Ignite Boston 3 on the 29th, there is no end to the “unConference” fun.

BarCamp is the epitome of an unConference, and as the website says, is organized “on the fly by attendees, for attendees.” There is no registration fee, but don’t let that stop you from thinking that this will be a beneficial event. Rather, think of it as an opportunity. This is two days of discussions, demoing projects, and joining cooperative events–for free! Topics from open source software to RSS Feeds to Social Software will be covered, and more. Check the BarCamp Boston website for more information.

This two day event will be followed by Ignite Boston 3–a fun, energetic evening of talking, learning, collaborating and drinking! As usual, Ignite Boston will be held at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square. Presentations are still being submitted, so if you think you have what it takes to give a 5 minute presentation with 20 slides that rotate every 15 seconds, sign up here.

For more information about Ignite Boston 3, check out ignite.oreilly.com, and have fun in Boston!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

O’Reilly is sponsoring Party with Palermo on June 2. We had a great time last year and can’t wait to go back to the Glo Lounge. Don’t forget to wear your favorite glow-in-the-dark Hawaiian shirt. If you’re looking for something to do Monday night before TechEd starts, come on by. This event is free but you do need to leave your business card.

Publishers Weekly discusses the impact Wikipedia’s success has had on the reference book industry. And Missing Manual author John Broughton was interviewed for this cover story:

John Broughton, author of “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual,” a recent addition to O’Reilly’s popular Missing Manual series, says that publishers can’t ignore Wikipedia’s influence: “I don’t see a way out for content that competes directly with Wikipedia at this point. They can’t compete with an infinite talent pool. And it’s current.”

The segments of the category hit hardest by the increasing availability of information online are the core staples of reference.

The implications are obvious for multi-volume encyclopedias, which everyone concedes have largely seen their day. Take Encyclopedia Americana, produced by Scholastic Library Publishing since it acquired Grolier in 2000. Until 2007, the 30-volume set was updated each year. The publisher has said that there likely won’t be a multi-volume print version when the encyclopedia is updated in 2009, with focus instead shifting to the online version.

Read all of Gwenda Bond’s thought provoking article–Fighting Facts and Figures–here.

That’s not a question you’ll hear a lot of people ask. In addition to being an internationally recognized authority on Silicon Valley business models and innovation economics, an award-winning strategy researcher, and a professor of high-tech entrepreneurship, strategy, and venture finance at some of the most impressive schools you can name, Amy Shuen is also the author of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide. At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in SF, we couldn’t keep enough copies of her book in stock; you would think it was required reading.

If you missed seeing Amy at the Expo, you can catch her in this fun video blog caught on the fly at the Expo by Robert Scoble. Amy’s own blog is an entertaining and educational read, too.

The winner of the free copy of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide

Two weeks ago, I offered to award a free copy of Amy’s book to someone who posted a comment about Web 2.0 to this blog. As always, the comments were excellent. In my totally arbitrary fashion, I have selected Scott Hodson as the winner (and I’ll notify him soon). He wrote:

I love Web 2.0 and the ability to mash other apps together! Over a year ago I created a WiFi maps site (http://802.11maps.com) using Google maps API and find the site very useful, and so do many others. I look forward to adding features to allow others to add value to our site through APIs and developer tools as well. Perhaps one of my greatest challenges is learning how to share and feel OK with it. It’s hard sharing or giving something away, something you created and worked on so much, but the hope is that in return for sharing the overall whole value of the effort will be much greater through the contributions of others.”
Scott Hodson | April 29, 2008 01:35 PM

Thanks for posting, Scott. And thank you to everyone else who posted a comment! Keep posting. I’ll have another book giveaway soon, and the odds of winning are excellent.

If you missed Steve Souders‘ live webcast on Even Faster Web Sites—or if you’d just like to see it one more time—you can download the movie now and watch it at your leisure.

One caveat: the file is rather large. It’s an 87 MB, .mov file that runs approximately one hour. If you click on the movie link, the movie will load into QuickTime in your browser window and begin to play. With a good Internet connection, this can take up to ten minutes. As an alternative, you can right-click on the movie link to download the file to your desktop. This may be preferable if you have a slower Internet connection or don’t plan to watch the entire movie in one sitting.

http://cachefly.oreilly.com/oreilly/videos/oreilly-fast-webcast.mov

You may prefer to get a taste of what the webcast was like with the ten-minute YouTube trailer below. Keep in mind that it’s lower resolution than the full movie.

You can also catch Steve in person as he co-chairs the upcoming Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference which takes place on June 23-24, 2008 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, California.

Mark Frauenfelder, Make magazine’s editor in chief, posted the preface of Robert Bruce Thompson’s latest book, the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry: All Lab, No Lecture recently on Boing Boing.

In the preface Thompson tells about receiving his first chemistry set from his parents one bright Christmas morning in 1964. “It was a Lionel/Porter/Chemcraft chemistry set, and the exact model I’d asked for. The biggest one, with dozens of chemicals and hundreds of experiments. Glassware, an alcohol lamp, a balance, even a centrifuge. Everything I needed to do real chemistry. I instantly forgot about the rest of my presents, even the BB gun. I started reading the manual, jumping from one experiment to another,” he explains.

Thompson, the author of Building the Perfect PC, Astronomy Hacks, and the Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders, also explains that he set out to write this book after a conversation with his friend and neighbor Jasmine Littlejohn.

“If Jasmine was to do more than make pretty colors and stinky smells, if Jasmine was to do real chemistry, she’d need more than just access to a lab. She’d need detailed instructions and some sort of structured plan to guide her through the learning process. She’d need to learn how to use the equipment and how to handle chemicals safely. She’d need well-designed experiments that focused on specific aspects of laboratory work. In other words, she’d need a home chemistry lab handbook, one devoted to serious chemistry rather than just playing around.

My first thought was to get Jasmine one of the classic home chemistry books published back in the 30s, 40s, or 50s. Some of those were excellent, but all of them required chemicals—such as benzene, carbon tetrachloride, salts of mercury, lead, and barium, concentrated nitric acid, and so on—that were once readily available but are now very expensive or difficult to obtain.

In one sense, that wasn’t really a problem. I already had most of that stuff in my lab. But even the best of those old books would have required some serious red-lining before I’d have turned Jasmine loose with it. One, for example, suggested tasting highly toxic lead acetate (also known as “sugar of lead”) to detect its sweetness. Others were a bit casual about handling soluble mercury compounds or contained experiments that were potentially extremely dangerous.

You can read the rest of Thompson’s inspiring preface here.

Thompson’s new guide is for responsible teenagers to adults, folks who want to learn about chemistry by doing real, hands-on laboratory experiments. It isn’t for those who want to make fireworks or explosive.

I’m also giving away a free copy of the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry. All you have to do is post a comment about your favorite chemistry set and/or experiment and/or why you think hands-on chemistry education is important by May 12, 2008. You may be the lucky winner of my fair but arbitrary selection.

In other news, Kevin wins a copy “Google Apps Hacks” for posting his favorite Google app hack. Check out Kevin’s winning hack and the all the other hacks here.

I worked for three days at Maker Faire and I couldn’t feel more energized and happier. As only one of several enticements, I was handed a Flip to try my hand at video interviewing. If you’re interested, you can view my very first attempts at videography (or perhaps we should say Flip-e-ography) here.

And for those looking for a deeper discussion about the Maker Faire phenomenon, check out O’Reilly editor Andy Oram’s thoughts on the Radar blog:

I found many science projects at Maker Faire more aesthetically satisfying than the self-consciously mind-altering artworks I’ve seem at some contemporary art shows. Many artists seem to lose their intuition for balance and beauty when trying to make a point, and their explorations of the promising channels offered by technology can end up clogged in its pipes. There is some computer-generated and networked art that is beautiful, thought-provoking, or both, but I’m been disappointed too often by art shows. Maker Faire focused on the fun first of all, the achievement second, and the aesthetics third. Ironically, this worked better.

Read the rest of Andy’s thought-provoking blog post here.

If you couldn’t make it to Maker Faire, here’s a terrific time lapse video from Maker Faire Day 1:

To get in on the Maker Faire action and the fun, head over to www.makezine.com!

That’s how ABC 7 News reporter Terry McSweeny described Maker Faire this morning as he visited the San Mateo fairgrounds to explore the much-talked-about event.

Arriving at 4:30 this morning to set a 30-foot-tall sculpture entitled “Epiphany” on fire, McSweeny went on to see the life-size mousetrap complete with a bathtub and crazy stairs, with the “trap” being a 2-ton safe that crushes cars, motorcycles, and wedding cakes. Yes, the wedding cake from the first wedding ever happening at Maker Faire in the “Never Was Haul” mobile home that runs on steam.

From 6-foot long battle ships launching bbs at each other to robots hurling iron balls at each other, there will be no shortage of excitement at the event this weekend.

Check out the video from this morning’s newscast on ABC 7 News, as well as makerfaire.com, for more information.

This weekend is the time for a highly anticipated event in the DIY community — Maker Faire. And along with this highly anticipated event comes… the Ultimate WALL·E, iDance WALL·E dancing boombox, and a remote control flying Tinker Bell — every DIY kid’s dream come true.

These three new robots — based on the Disney*Pixar new movie WALL·E and the classic Tinker Bell — will debut at Maker Faire. The Ultimate WALL·E is also MP3 compatible and features built-in speakers.

Come join us at the San Mateo fairgrounds for hours of fun this Saturday and Sunday. For more information about Maker Faire, visit makerfaire.com or view the press release.

For more information about the robots, see the press release from Disney Consumer Products.