Sebastopol, California
Areas of Expertise:
- Web 2.0
- open source
- emerging technologies
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Tim blogs at:
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Points of Control: The Web 2.0 Summit Map - O'Reilly Radar
August 31 2010
In my blog post State of the Internet Operating System a few months ago (and the followup Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars), I used the analogy of.... read morePoints of Control: The Web 2.0 Summit Map
August 31 2010
In my blog post State of the Internet Operating System a few months ago (and the followup Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars), I used the analogy of "the Great Game" played out between England and Russia in the late Victorian era for control of access to India through what is… read moreOpening the doors of government to innovation
August 06 2010
When I organize a conference, I don't just reach out to interesting speakers, I try to find people who can help to tell a story about what's important and where the future is going. We've been posting speakers for the second annual Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC Sept 7-8,… read moreThe Louvre of the Industrial Age
July 30 2010
This morning I had the chance to get a tour of The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, along with Dale Dougherty, creator of Make: and Makerfaire, and Marc Greuther, the chief curator of the museum. I had expected a museum dedicated to the auto industry, but it's so much… read morePutting Online Privacy in Perspective
May 30 2010
When I wrote last week about Facebook privacy flap, I was speaking out of the frustration that many technologists with a sense of perspective feel when we see uninformed media hysteria about the impact of new technology. (How many of you remember all the scare stories about the risks of… read moreMy Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy
May 21 2010
In a recent Inc Magazine live chat, I found myself, somewhat surprisingly even to me defending Facebook regarding their ongoing and evolving privacy policy. Here's what I said: The essence of my argument is that there's enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need… read moreState of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars
April 30 2010
This post is Part Two of my State of the Internet Operating System. If you haven't read Part One, you should do so before reading this piece. As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system,… read moreThe State of the Internet Operating System
March 29 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? read moreMarch 26 2010
In response to the IEEE's report on Patent Power, which lists the top companies ranked by number of patents, Ari Shahdadi and Brad Burnham made trenchant comments in email that I thought were worth sharing (with their permission): Ari wrote: The main article is sad to read, with choice quotes… read moreAt the Forefront of the Next Industrial Revolution
March 24 2010
I chose Limor Fried, founder and chief engineer of Adafruit Industries, as the subject of my post for Ada Lovelace Day for four reasons: Limor is a hardware engineer - one of those bastions of tech in which it's most important for young girls considering future careers to understand that… read moreNHIN Direct: Open Healthcare and Government as a Platform
March 11 2010
In my advocacy around Government 2.0, I've been focused on the idea that government should act like a platform provider rather than a complete solution provider. That is, government should lay down rules of the road, create core functionality that others can build on, and then let the private sector… read moreThe Convergence of Advertising and E-commerce
February 16 2010
With hundreds of millions of users paying to download music, applications and ebooks on mobile phones, with reports of Zynga generating hundreds of millions of dollars from selling virtual goods in social games, with startups like Square making mobile payment systems the hot new startup category, it's clear that e-commerce… read moreA Dream About Augmented Reality Fiction
February 14 2010
Last night I dreamed that one of my authors (no name or face that I can recall - one of the phantasms created by the half-waking imagination) had sold me rights to a novel he'd written, and was eager for me to publish it as an ebook. It turned out… read moreFebruary 09 2010
Social networks get all the attention, but email remains an important information console for many. That's why the introduction of Google Buzz is so noteworthy. It adds the power of asymmetric following to Gmail's interface. read moreIgnite, Syndicated Events, and Social Media Marketing
February 09 2010
As we approach Global Ignite Week, a collection of Ignite events around the world during the first week of March, I can't help but think about the future of conferences, one of O'Reilly's major businesses. Here are some of the things we're learning from Ignite. People love the rapid-fire format.… read moreA Few Thoughts on the Nexus One
January 05 2010
There will be many posts focusing on the look, feel, and features of the Nexus One, so I'm going to focus on what Android's latest incarnation says about the competitive landscape - what I've elsewhere called the war for the web. Android vs. iPhone is one important front in that… read moreCommerce and the Wealth of Nations
December 31 2009
I was struck the other day by an article in the New York Times that describes the different approaches of the US and China to Afghanistan, in which the US shoulders the burden of war, while China reaps the benefits of commerce. Quoting from the article, I tweeted: "American troops… read moreWhy Using ShopSavvy Might Not Be So Savvy
December 18 2009
Reading this morning's New York Times story, Mobile Phones Become Essential Tools for Holiday Shopping, I was reminded again of the fundamental shortsightedness of so many of our economic decisions, that flaw in human nature that makes us seize on temporary advantage without thinking of the long-term consequences. The article… read moreNovember 16 2009
On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active. It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem… read moreSafari Books Online 6.0: A Cloud Library as an alternate model for ebooks
October 27 2009
There has been a lot of attention paid to ebooks lately, and for good reason. Electronic books are portable, searchable, and more affordable than print books. The web has accustomed readers to having the latest information at their fingertips; we all ask why books should be any less available "on… read moreThoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal
October 25 2009
Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack.… read moreOctober 20 2009
Last year at Web 2.0 Summit, one prominent tech executive responded to our focus on "Web meets World" -- the way web technology is being used to attack the world's problems -- by saying "I don't come to this conference to learn how to do good. I come to learn… read moreBlog Action Day 2009: Climate Change
October 15 2009
Today is Blog Action Day 2009. This is an annual event, held every October 15, with a goal of encouraging an outpouring of simultaneous comment on an important issue calling for global action. This year, the designated subject is climate change. Back in January, I wrote a blog post summarizing… read moreMy Conversation with Austan Goolsbee at Web 2.0 Summit
October 15 2009
He introduces himself as "another tall, skinny guy with big ears and a funny name." Economics adviser to Barack Obama during the campaign, and now a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Austan Goolsbee is a key figure in… read more"He not busy being born is busy dying"
October 14 2009
I found myself quoting that great Bob Dylan line the other day on a mailing list for those dealing with the changes sweeping through the publishing industry. Michael Coffey from Publisher's Weekly wrote an eloquent and moving lament that expresses the fear of many that the book might be losing… read moreMicrosoft Press Enters Strategic Alliance with O'Reilly
September 24 2009
Today, Microsoft and O'Reilly Media announced an agreement to support and expand Microsoft Press. Under the terms of the strategic alliance, O'Reilly will be the exclusive distributor of Microsoft Press titles and co-publisher of all Microsoft Press titles, on Nov. 30, 2009. We'll be working with Microsoft to develop new… read moreWhat Does Government 2.0 Mean To You?
August 26 2009
As many of you know, I've built a new conference, Gov 2.0 Summit, around the idea of the government as platform: how can government design programs to be generative, to use Zittrain's phrase? How do we get beyond the idea that participation means "public input" (shaking the vending machine to… read moreSeeing Our Culture With Fresh Eyes
July 23 2009
The other day, I read a novel called Prester John, by John Buchan, published in 1910. This story about a Zulu uprising in South Africa as experienced by a young Scottish immigrant is an entertaining read in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling or H. Rider Haggard: adventure in the furthest… read moreRadical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard
June 30 2009
Today, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Vivek Kundra, the US national CIO, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov. The dashboards are designed to help Vivek and the CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending. At the top… read moreMy 140conf Talk: Twitter as Publishing
June 24 2009
I spoke at Jeff Pulver's 140conf a few weeks ago. My subject was the continuity of what I do, from publishing through conferences through my presence on twitter. I tried to draw the connections, and to explain how "social media" means drawing from, curating, and amplifying the voices of a… read moreA Manifesto on Health Data Rights
June 23 2009
As a medical patient, I've always assumed that my medical records were something that I had a right to - after all, they are about me, and my freedom to share them with a second doctor, or see them myself so I can understand my own medical situation, seems self-evident.… read moreVelocity: The Art of Web Operations
June 22 2009
Two years ago, at the 2007 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, a group of web operations professionals, led by Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders along with O'Reilly editor Andy Oram, asked for a meeting with me. Their message: "We need a separate conference for our community." That community: the web operations… read moreThe Benefits of a Classical Education
June 20 2009
As some of you may know, I got my undergraduate degree in Greek and Latin Classics. So when Forbes asked me to do an interview on the subject of how my Classical education had affected my business career, I agreed. The result, part of a special report called Power, Ambition,… read moreHealth Care Costs: Am I missing something? Or is there a lot of flimflam going on?
June 20 2009
Driving home from work, listening to NPR's story about health care costs, I couldn't help but be struck by a couple of numbers. The Obama health plan will cost a trillion dollars we're told. A TRILLION sounds big enough to end the debate, doesn't it? Then I hear, almost as… read morePersonal Democracy Forum: Politics in the Web 2.0 Era
June 18 2009
In the past year or so, I've been urging people to work on stuff that matters. The world is faced with serious problems, and we in the technology community have a unique contribution to make, as the tools we've created help us to collaborate and organize at an unprecedented scale… read moreJeff Bezos at Wired Disruptive by Design conference
June 15 2009
Jeff Bezos is very quotable. Listeing to Steve Levy interview him at the Wired Disruptive by Design event in New York, I was furiously taking notes. Here are the quotes I managed to capture: "We've co-evolved with our tools for thousands of years," he says, explaining how ease of Kindle… read moreGoogle I/O in Pictures: Google Culture at Work
May 29 2009
I had a few miscellaneous notes on Google I/O that I wanted to share, including a few anthropological observations best made with pictures. I thought it was really interesting that there were more registration lines for Academia than there were for general admission. Google knows the same truth as Apple,… read moreMay 29 2009
After the press conference following this morning's keynotes, I was part of a small group conversation with Lars Rasmussen, head of the Google Wave team. He told the story of how they pitched Sergey Brin on the Wave project. "We'd worked on our message," he said, "and we boiled it… read moreGoogle Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?
May 28 2009
Yesterday's Google I/O keynote highlighted the power of HTML 5 to match functionality long experienced in desktop applications. This morning, Google plans to announce an HTML 5-based application - still very much in the early stages of development - that represents a profound advance in the state of the art.… read moreGoogle Web Elements and Google's Iceberg Strategy (Google I/O)
May 27 2009
At Google I/O this morning, DeWitt Clinton announed Google Web Elements, a new simple interface layer to Google Ajax APIs. The goal is to make bringing Google features to other sites as easy as cut and paste. And indeed, the cut and paste functionality is impressive: Add news, custom search,… read moreMay 27 2009
"Never underestimate the web," says Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra in his keynote at Google I/O this morning. He goes on to tell the story of a meeting he remembers when he was VP of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft five years ago. "We believed that web apps would never… read moreWelcoming Eric Ries to the Radar Team
May 23 2009
The Radar blog is a community of thinkers organized around the O’Reilly mission to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. Some of the folks with posting privileges on Radar are O'Reilly employees: Brady Forrest organizes the ETech, Where 2.0 and Web 2.0 Expo events, Mike Loukides, Andy… read moreClothing as Conversation (Twitter Tees on Threadless)
May 19 2009
Threadless just announced their Twitter Tees on Threadless program. What a great idea. Submit or nominate tweets, community votes, best make it onto shirts. From the two shirts they sent me in advance, I can see only one trick they are missing: the author of the tweet is on the… read moreGoogle's Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web
May 14 2009
There's a long-time debate between those who advocate for semantic markup, and those who believe that machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which computer programs actually understand the meaning of what they see and read. Google has of course been… read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
Multimedia
Webcast: What is Gov 2.0?
May 11, 2010
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes. Cost: Free What is the open government revolution and why should technologists care about it? Join Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media founder and CEO, for a discussion about improving efficiency and transparency in government...
Webcast: Web 2.0 Expo Preview
April 22, 2010
Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by O'Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb, showcases the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms and design strategies for the builders of the next-generation Web. In this webcast, we'll provide insight into the big themes...
Webcast: Web Squared
June 25, 2009
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes. Cost: Free As we approach the six-year mark from the original Web 2.0 thesis, the trends are becoming clearer than ever. Once applications live in the cloud, the key to success will be harnessing network effects...
Webcast: Twitter Power Tips
May 21, 2009
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes. Preview Video: Free Full Video: Available on Safari Books Online At first blush, Twitter appears to be an easy and friendly medium. But don't be deceived: it's also powerful and complex, supporting a rich third...
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