Aaron Strout:             

So I’d like to introduce today’s special guest.  We have Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media.  Welcome, Tim.

Tim O’Reilly:              

Glad to be here.

Aaron Strout:             

So, Tim, we talked a little bit about this in our pre-session, but I’ve always been under the assumption that you were known for coining the term Web 2.0, and you set me straight, that you had some concepts around this, but it was actually your other co-founder of O’Reilly, Dale Dougherty, who was the real coiner of the phrase “Web 2.0.”  Can you talk a little bit about that?  You had an interesting story.

Tim O’Reilly:              

Yeah.  So I certainly was focused on the ideas that are wrapped up in Web 2.0.  Actually from the very beginning of my public speaking about open source in 1997 I was telling everybody the real consequence of open source is something that’s happening on the Web, it’s changing the rules of the computer industry.  I had a talk that I gave in ’97 called “Hardware, Software, Infoware,” and then I launched a conference on peer-to-peer in 2001 that was really about the Internet as platform, and we focused on what do P2P and Web services and distributed computation have in common; they’re all about searching out the possibilities of the Net as platform. 

I wrote a paper called “The Open Source Paradigm Shift,” which was about the shift of value to these database-backed Web sites and what this meant, you know, for the future of the industry and the quantization of software and the rise of something else.  But the term Web 2.0 actually came up in a brainstorming session that Dale Dougherty held with our partner in the Web 2.0 conference, CMP.  We were trying to find something we could do together.  They had approached us, they go, “We like what you guys do.  Is there some conference we could do jointly?”  And Dale said, “Well gee” – you know, this is after the dot-com bust.  This brainstorm session happened in 2003. 

And, you know, it was really around this idea that the Web is coming back.  You know, the companies that survived have something in common, there’s these new startups that are really interesting; what does the second coming of the Web look like.  And that was the focus of the conference.  But I immediately jumped on it and said, “Well, this is actually the right name for this phenomenon I’ve been talking about and calling the Internet operating system.” 

So as we built the conference we sort of wrapped that story up in it, and even more – it was, they were present somewhat in the first conference in 2004, but, you know, I really sealed the deal when I wrote the “What is Web 2.0” paper in 2005 to release at the second conference, because it was really, you know, the name had started to take off and it made sense, and even though it’s not the best name because it suggests somehow the Web had gotten a new version number, when in fact instead it was this idea of this is the second coming of the Web.  It really seemed to have caught the moment now, and this idea I’d been talking about for seven or eight years was actually now really on the tip of everyone’s tongue, and Web 2.0 was a name that, for whatever reason, worked.  So, you know, I took the ball and ran with it.

Aaron Strout:             

Do you ever sit back and say, “Holy cow, I can’t believe how much traction this name has gotten”?  I mean, it really is ubiquitous, and I think it’s taught people a whole new philosophy, a way of thinking about things.  And obviously there are a lot of other contributors to it, but it’s the way they roll it up.  Does that ever amaze you?

Tim O’Reilly:              

Well, you know, in one sense it’s not something new.  I mean, I was also deeply involved in the promulgation of the term “open source.”  And you know, a lot of what I do in this industry is storytelling.  And certainly I have a somewhat different take on open source than say someone like Eric Raymond or Bruce Perens, who were the guys who actually in that case coined the term “open source.”  Actually it was Christine Peterson who actually coined the term, but Eric and Bruce were the guys who wrote the open source definition and got the initial definition. 

But I was the one who actually organized the meeting where it brought together a much broader group of developers who were less associated with Linux and more associated with the Internet side of things, and told the story that actually made everybody wake up to the fact that open source was about more than just the GNU project and Linux, and the fact that it was running the Internet.

So I look at that success story where literally people were in April of 1998 saying free software is this fringe phenomenon, and you look at long-haired Richard Stallman saying, “Commercial software is evil.”  And I went out there and I framed the story very differently.  I said, “No, no, no.  This is in fact the next big thing, and all you guys who say ‘We would never use free software’ in fact depend on it.  Every one of you has a domain name.  It’s running on BIND, the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon, a piece of software that’s written and maintained by a longhaired, pony-tailed programmer in Redwood City.  It’s not from a big company.  And guess what?  Your Web server comes from these other guys.” 

And we literally had a press conference at this Open Source Summit, as it came to be called, where I basically told the story.  I lined about 15 of these guys up at a long table, invited in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and all the tech media and said, “Each of these guys has dominant market share based on nothing but the power of their ideas and software they give away.”  And within a month or two Linus Torvalds was on the cover of Forbes with a big spread inside with Brian Behlendorf of Apache, Paul Vixie of the Internet Software Consortium, Larry Wall of Perl, Guido van Rossum, they’re all spread out there in the magazine.  And we told the story to the world, and I think Web 2.0 was kind of a similar thing, where we basically were able to see what was happening and frame it in a way that it made sense to people.

Many, many years ago I read a line, actually it was in a Parade magazine in the Sunday paper, from Edwin Schlossberg – who actually was married to Caroline Kennedy – an author.  And he wrote, “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”  And I spent a lot of my career of sort of technology activism trying to frame stories in a way that made sense to people.  Again, people don’t necessarily know this about O’Reilly, but we actually created the very first commercial Web site.  We were able to persuade the National Science Foundation, which up to that point had forbidden advertising or any kind of commercial activity on the Internet, that commercial activity should be okay, and we were able to tell a story about why that was important.

Aaron Strout:             

So that’s a nice segue on two fronts, the commercialization, and you talked a little bit before that about businesses sort of inadvertently using Web 2.0 technologies without really knowing it.  Can you talk a little bit about Enterprise 2.0 maturity?  So how are businesses adopting these Web 2.0 technologies and how is it fundamentally changing them?  Really where are they on that curve?

Tim O’Reilly:

I would say that most businesses are on the side of they’ve heard the buzzword, they are adopting the outward semblance, but they don’t really understand it.  And the reason why I say this is they’ll say things like, “Well, you know, we’re doing Web 2.0.  We have blogging and community and we’re using wikis.”  And I go, “Well, yeah, that’s a good first step.”  Good first step.  But for me the essence of Web 2.0 is building applications that gain value from their users.  They are literally built by user interaction so that they get better the more people use them.  They harness network effects to build the application.  Not just to build its distribution; virality is part of it.  But literally the application gets these increasing returns from data that’s collected from the users. 

So for example, you look at Google and you realize, “oh my gosh, every time somebody makes a link on the Web, that adds value to Google.”  Google doesn’t pay them, they don’t volunteer.  They don’t even think they’re contributing to Google, but they are.  But what’s more than that, Google realized that in their economic model, the ad auction, they’re mining the users in real-time.  People forget this.  They say, “Oh, well Overture invented the search advertising model, and Google didn’t invent it.” 

That’s not true, because what Google did that was different was they did not sell the ad to the highest bidder.  They did an ad auction in which in real-time they were able to measure the effectiveness of the ad, how did people click on it, and so they could sell an ad for half the price that would get five times the clicks, right, and get more than twice the money, right.  But that means that Google had to mine their users and have a relationship with their users, and the users literally contributing to the product in real-time. 

And so one of the things when I go to this idea of Enterprise 2.0, I gave a talk once called “What Would Google Do” to an Enterprise Audience, and I gave an example, and I started with banks and phone companies.  And I said, “Gee, check box, has big data centers.  Yep, banks do.  Phone companies do.  Has sales software that’s monetized as a service, not for sale.  Yep, banks, check box; phone companies, check box.  Has databases that get better the more people use them.”  All right?  There’s definitely network effects to a phone.  So I said, “What’s the difference?”

And the difference is that for most enterprises all the data they collect is sort of seen as this back-office operation, whereas in Web 2.0 the data is driven real-time into user-facing applications.  So if you look at eBay or Amazon, yes, they’re engaged with the Web, and yes, they’re providing these Web services.  But at bottom what makes them Web 2.0 in my definition is that they’re building real-time user-facing services that are driven by their community and the data that’s generated by that community. 

So what an enterprise needs to do to become Web 2.0 is to ask themselves, “What kind of data assets do I own?  And how do those assets get better through user interaction, and how could they be made real-time and user facing?”  So a great example of that is in the phone or in the email.  You know, you think about social networking as a phenomenon.  Well your email knows who your social network is, your phone knows who your social network is, but are phone companies building social network interfaces? 

You know, they could be building a smart address books that users annotated that gave them stickiness with their users.  Instead they have these user-hostile plans by locking you in by contract.  Well gosh, if you start annotating your data and had the data be better and better and they had services that were – you got better services based on the number of people in your network that were on the same phone.  They do that a little bit with call friends free or whatever, but they really could do way, way more with that.  And those would be Web 2.0 services.

Or think about the enterprise supply chain.  How would you actually build a system where all of your suppliers were contributing data into a pool that benefited all of them and benefited you?  That would be Enterprise 2.0.

Aaron Strout:             

So it’s really, if I get this correctly, it sounds like we at Mzinga here, we build communities for companies, and there’s a lot of the explicit connectivity, and it sounds like a lot of what you are talking about is the implicit building of infrastructure through basically the adding of data through peer-to-peer, and that that’s really what makes data [inaudible].

Tim O’Reilly:              

Well, yes, I think that definitely is a lot of it.  But it really is the idea of – I think ultimately, you know, if you take the long view on what Web 2.0 is, and this goes back to this idea of building the Internet operating system, we’re building a global nervous system for the world, and if you think about a nervous system, it’s always learning, by analogy to the human brain.  So it’s accumulating data, it’s making predictions on that data, it’s allowing you to affect actions based on those predictions.  All right?  And it’s sort of providing various – you know, so the data provides various kinds of services. 

Well, you start thinking about Web 2.0 in that context, and first of all you realize that one of the big changes that’s still not fully realized is that explicit contribution by users is a tiny fraction of all the possible contributions.  I’ve already talked about Google and how they use the implicit as well as the explicit.  But you think about, take Amazon, “People who bought this also bought.”  That’s a kind of contribution that is very different than the explicit contribution of saying, “I give this five stars and I want to write this review.”  And it’s much more data mining.  You know, it’s like something a company might do in their back office, but it’s data mining turned into a user-facing service.

Now start thinking about, there’s a U.K. insurance company called –Norwich Union – pay-as-you-drive insurance.  You know, where they’re hooking up a GPS to a real-time application that basically sets your insurance rates based on where you drive.  Right?  That’s user contribution.  It’s a Web 2.0 service because it’s data-driven, it’s actually driven by user activity, and the service is sort of creating these feedback loops with those users.  That’s a Web 2.0 business model for the enterprise.

Aaron Strout:             

That’s very cool.

Tim O’Reilly:              

And I think in some ways you can look at, you know, it’s definitely people would say, “Oh, you’re stretching.  Everything’s Web 2.0.”  Well yes, everything is becoming Web 2.0.  You know, I look at Wal-Mart and how they manage their supply chain versus some less-effective supply chain manager.  You know, they built sort of a neuronal infrastructure that connects their suppliers directly to their stores.  Somebody takes something off the shelf and something gets put on the pipeline on the other end in China, you know, and that’s a Web 2.0 application, in my definition.  Again, as you start integrating these ideas across the frontier and you see where these trends start to converge. 

And so a lot of what I’m focused on when I think about Web 2.0 is not just this idea that it’s an advertising-based business model, that it’s these Web applications, it’s really about, what does it mean when everything is connected and what new rules apply to business when everything is connected.  And the rules that I’ve been able to determine are, one, users add value; two, that users contribute even when they don’t know that they’re contributing; three, you build an architecture of participation that helps people to contribute without knowing they’re contributing; four, you build, so data assets that literally get better the more users are connected; and five, you build services against those.

Aaron Strout: 

So to that end, I love those rules because that completely makes sense.  You may bristle the way I’m going to word this, but I think you’ll get it after I spit it out.  Some people do feel like Web 2.0 has sort of jumped the shark, and by that, not the conference, not necessarily that it’s going away, but it’s almost become such a mainstream thing, at least in peoples’ eyes.  I know you talked about enterprises, some just paying lip service to it are only really dipping their toe, but has it really become so ubiquitous, like electricity, that it has lost its buzzworthiness?  Is it not, you know, sort of as exciting anymore because it’s just there?

Tim O’Reilly:              

Well, there’s two questions there.  One is does the term continue to have buzz value, and I would guess that there’s ups and downs.  And again, looking at the history of open source gives you some analogies, you know, sort of now is everything open source, whether or not it is.  So people bastardize the term, and Web 2.0 has certainly been bastardized, and that’s part of becoming mainstream, and that might at some point say, “Yeah, that’s happened enough that the term loses its meaning.”

Are the trend lines finished?  Are we done with this?  No way.  I mean this is kind of like personal computing.  You know, think about, personal computing went through the stage where the titans of the industry today would say, “Oh, PC is just a toy” to realizing that was in fact the game, and that this funny little upstart company called Microsoft was the big dog, to people trying to compete with that, right? 

And then you really entered the Microsoft era.  You know, here was like IBM.  IBM is going to fight back with OS2.  You know, I mean that’s about the stage that we’re at with Web 2.0, Microsoft is going to fight back.  The previous incumbent of the previous paradigm is now trying to buy Yahoo! so they can fight back against Google.  That’s like IBM with OS2 against Windows, right? 

So when was that in the Windows era?  It was pretty early still.

Aaron Strout:             

Right.  Yeah.

Tim O’Reilly:              

You know, so I think, you know, in terms of as a business stage we’re about at the OS2 versus Windows 3.1 stage of that cycle.

Aaron Strout:             

So we have a ways to go.

Tim O’Reilly:              

We have a long way to go.

Aaron Strout:             

So I have a publishing question next, and this is, I think I had mentioned at the beginning of the call that I did a little crowd sourcing for this myself.  I like to throw questions out on Twitter to ask people what would they ask Tim O’Reilly.  And so one of the questions I think was a really thoughtful one that came through is about publishing, obviously something you know well, combined with Web 2.0.  So to give the quick version of it, basically it asks about the fact that publishers who produce new content on a regular basis, there are more and more of these every day, there seems to be a lack of semantic authoring tools for Web content, in particular for annotation of new Web content they create with minimal effort.  Could you give us some thoughts on that?

Tim O’Reilly:              

Well, I have a couple of responses to that.  First of all, I mean I love Semantic.  You know, I think that the idea that there are new features on the Web that are going to be driven by the addition of Semantic content is a powerful idea.  But I think the idea that explicit Semantics are the way to get there are is just dead wrong.  You know, I don’t think Semantic authoring – maybe somebody will magically come up with some great tools, but I just, I don’t buy it.

For me the breakthroughs of Web 2.0 actually come in realizing that there’s meaning that’s already there in some piecemeal Semantics that nobody was exploiting.  So take page rank, you know, it wasn’t like somebody sort of wrote some additional code into the HTML to say, “This link means such-and-such.”  It was that Google realized that using statistical methods they could infer meaning and ranking and various other kinds of data from this thing.  They were overloading the link.  It didn’t just take you from one page to another; it actually had a hidden freight of meaning.

So you look at a company like Wesabe, which is a company I’m invested in, their personal finance application, you could look at them merely as an equivalent to Quicken Online.  But no, they’re more than that.  Because what they realize is that how people spend their money is a vote, just like Google realized that a link is a vote.  They’re finding the hidden semantics in how people spend their money.

So I think the idea of explicit semantic authoring is really not the way this is going to happen.  It actually kind of surprises me in many ways that the semantic Web idea kind of has come from Tim Berner’s lead, because Tim, of course, was the guy who broke all the accepted canons of hypertext by, for example, making links one way.  And all the people who thought, you know, he broke hypertext, the Web is messy and that’s what makes it work.  And this idea that somehow we’re going to build this rich texture of semantic data I think misses what’s really happening in practice.  There’s semantic data already there.  And so if you look at mash-ups, for example, that’s a Semantic layer, and it wasn’t that people had to add additional information to the Web.  They go, “Oh wait, we can recognize addresses.”  The semantics was already there.  What we needed was, for example, a mapping substrate, so that we could then use the semantics that were already there. 

Or take all the music applications, you know, they go to CDDB to look up tracks, right?  Did somebody actually have to actually add that explicit metadata?  Not really, because what the CDDB folks realized was that there was a unique signature that came from the sequence, the length and the sequence of songs uniquely identified in album, and they were able to say, “Wow, if it has a track that’s 3:29 long followed by a track that’s 4:15 long,” you know, they were able to say, “Wow, I know what that is,” and give you the album name back.  So they found the implicit Semantics that were already there.

It’s not to say that we couldn’t benefit from more semantic tools, and I certainly see a role in publishing a great conversation at our money tech conference in New York last month with Devon Wenig from Reuters, and what Reuters is trying to do is, as a service for their downstream customers, is trying to add Semantic tagging to news so that those downstream customers can use it in applications in a more interesting way.  And I go, “That’s a great application.”  These guys have a targeted market, they’re looking to serve that market, and they see how Semantic tagging will help.  Somebody say, “Yeah, this news story goes with this ticker symbol or this security,” whatever it might be, that’s really useful.  But the idea, for example, that every author out there on the Web, you know, the guy who writes the news story ought to be doing Semantic tagging, I just don’t buy it.

What I do buy is this other aspect besides discovering implicit semantics is creating a context.  This goes back to the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think, but the skill of coding is to create a context in which other people can share.  People didn’t go around putting little FOF, you know, friend of a friend, XML sort of structures on their Web pages, but they did wind up signing up for Facebook, and Facebook is this huge data structure describing a FOF network.  Maybe not with as much precision as FOF would like, because they basically just have this silly idea that, “Well, you’re just my friend.  And what if you’re not my friend; you’re actually my colleague and I don’t like you very much.”  I don’t have enough meaning for that.  But so what, eventually Facebook and other social networking applications will have extracted and built a new meaning layer, but not through semantic tagging tools. 

And I see this all over the Web, people are creating new contacts in which semantic information is created and then they’re extracting it – other people are extracting it and mining it, often with statistical techniques. 

 Aaron Strout:             

Well that was great.  I appreciate that and I think will be a valuable answer to the person that asked me that question, so thank you for taking the time to answer that thoroughly.

I have two last questions, one sort of probably will take a couple of minutes to wrap your head around, and then the last one is a pretty straightforward one.  So you have your E-Tech conference, and to me the E-Tech conference and discussions with other friends feels like it’s sort of the new Web 2.0 conference, it’s where the latest and greatest, most bleeding-edge technologies are being discussed and talked about.  What’s next after that?  How far out do you think, and is that really sort of the newcomer of the Web 2.0?

 Tim O’Reilly:              

Well, I mean it’s actually kind of ironic because E-Tech actually precedes Web 2.0 as a conference.  In fact, when I told you the story earlier about the P2P conference, when we created Web 2.0 we also renamed the previous peer-to-peer and Web services conference to be E-Tech.  Now the reason was that we wanted to have a conference that was always about the next big thing, and then our theory was as we identified those next big things we’d spin them out into separate conferences.

So the theme of this Internet operating system was the theme of the early E-Tech conferences, then we launched Web 2.0 from it.  Then E-Tech kind of overlapped a little bit because we were continuing to explore that there.  We increasingly have pushed it away from that into what are the things we’re really looking at now.

So when you look at where those areas are, there’s a number of them.  A big one for us is the future of manufacturing.  We have this idea that hackers often show us the shape of the future.  And a few years back we noticed that a lot of people were hacking on stuff again, and it was everything from reusing old electronics to 3-D printing and the whole fab-lab kind of thing that Neil Gershon felt was pushing, to people using flat world manufacturing facilities in China to produce products one-off.  You know, all kinds of stuff bubbling up.

We actually launched a magazine called Make about the sort of new do-it-yourself movement, but we’re also looking at robotics, we’re looking at sort of manufacturing innovation.  So I think just the engagement of computing with stuff is probably I think the next big thing.  Actually, with Make we also launched kind of a new generation county fair called the Maker Fair.  We had 45,000 people show up last year.  So that’s really a next big thing that we see.

There’s another piece of it which is very related to the future of Web 2.0, and that is the rise of sensors.  You know, I’ve talked a little bit about the idea of Web 2.0 moving from people sharing by typing on keyboards to people generating data just as they, you know, travel around.  You know, your car reports in, drives your insurance application; your phone reports in and drives your social networking application.  We also see new interfaces coming from sensors, so you see what’s happening with the Nintendo Wii and the big multi-touch displays that actually which was shown at E-Tech, was it two years ago, you know, they use them on CNN on the election coverage, where people are dragging things around on those big screens, the Minority Report kind of interface.  You see that obviously hit the iPhone.

So these whole new interfaces.  I think speech synthesis is going to hit big.  So we’re really breaking out of the PC paradigm.  So for me that’s a really big bucket that really has to do with – and again, the way I think, we don’t necessarily have a name for it yet.  I told you about how Web 2.0 coalesced out of a lot of ideas, I was working around the Internet operating system and how open source was changing the industry.  Well here I’m looking at what are sensors and the rise of sensor-driven applications, and new user interfaces and mobile applications have to do.

I’ve started to talk much more about the idea of ambient computing, and maybe that’s the term that I would use to describe that.  Another area that I-

Aaron Strout:             

So ambience-

Tim O’Reilly:              

What?

Aaron Strout:             

I’m sorry.  I was just going to say when the ambient computing conference becomes huge three years from now I can point back to this podcast and say, “Guys, I captured it here first.”

Tim O’Reilly:              

Yeah.  The other area that I find just fascinating is, again, watching what hackers – people are starting to hack on their bodies, and we’re starting to see, you know, everything from Quinn Norton, who some of you may know of, she literally implanted a magnet under – in her fingertips so she could sense electrical fields.  People are – we’re finding these guys working – there’s a guy at MIT who’s working on how you can change peoples’ moods with magnets.  I mean this is serious research now, you know.

People – there’s an article in Nature recently about so the ethics of brain-enhancing drugs.  You know, we’re saying we don’t like steroids, but what about mind enhancement?  We did a book a couple of years ago called Mind Hacks, which was a huge success.  And I think there’s something happening on the frontier of neuroscience that I think is going to be really, really big. 

And particularly what’s interesting, of course, is neuroscience starts to connect us with computers.  You know, the computers are getting smarter; we’re getting more connected to them.  You know, computing allows us to actually do things.  Again, you’re seeing some touches of this in say advanced prosthetics, where people are hooking up actually devices and you’ve got real bionics starting to happen.  So very cool stuff there.

And of course, personal genomics is another huge area that we’re starting to explore.

Aaron Strout:             

So you’ve teed me up well for the last question and I’m going to tweak it a little bit.  I normally ask people if they had one blog and one blog only to read what would it be, but I think – I have a funny feeling-

Tim O’Reilly:              

I like that question.  I like that question.  I want to answer that.

Aaron Strout:             

Okay, so what I’m trying to get at is, I mean, I’m just sitting here listening to you and I feel like I’m a fairly technology-savvy, open-minded person, and it just – the wealth of information that you have blows me away.  So I was going to change it a little bit and say if you had one publication that you currently read where it could even give us a fraction of how you come up with some of these ideas, what would it be?  But I’ll ask you the blog question.  If you had one that you could read, whose blog would you read and why?

Tim O’Reilly:              

Here’s the thing I would say, I’ll pick one that I won’t say because they don’t even consider it a blog.  Slashdot.  I think Slashdot was actually in many ways one of the first blogs.  It drives me nuts that people don’t give them credit as a blog.  You know, they don’t appear on any of the blog rankings.  You know, but it’s a reflection of Rob Malda’s personal voice.  Yes, they have – but there’s a lot of group blogs these days.  He doesn’t do it all himself.

I always loved, when it first came out, that News for Nerds: Stuff that Matters, you know is a brilliant formulation of something I believe in deeply.  And to this day Slashdot has a broader scope than any other blog in terms of kind of bringing – giving you kind of a sense of what I would call the alpha geek zeitgeist.  You know, so when we started thinking about hardware hacking, all this, part of the reason we noticed that is there were more hardware hacking stories appearing on Slashdot.  You know, you start looking at that it covers science, they cover – you know, so it’s not just like in the ghetto of whatever’s currently popular, like all of the current Web 2.0 blogs, for example.

So in terms of other publications, you know, I think being in the computer industry, you tend to think of computer publications, but I think you learn a lot more from science these days.  I think MIT’s Technology Review is a great magazine for kind of stuff that’s coming out on the engineering front.  And of course Nature is just – and I have to say I love the guys at Nature.  We do a bunch of work with them and, you know, figuring out the – see, ‘cause what’s really interesting is you have these fundamental breakthroughs in science and fundamental breakthroughs in engineering, and then what happens is hackers start playing with it. 

People have this idea that technology transfer happens from, the research lab in the industry and so on.  And I’m sure that’s a real path for information diffusion.  But what we see and what we’ve always celebrated at O’Reilly is this sort of hacker path, where people start playing with the technology for fun because they love it.  That’s why the subtitle of Make is “Technology on your own time.”

You know, people are playing with it for fun, and they in some sense invent a future, and then entrepreneurs come along and they go, “Ooh, good idea.”  So look back on the Web, those first Web sites, they were just for fun.  People were going, “How cool is this?”  And then along came people, and I was among the first who said, you know, and Dale was the guy who really first came up with the idea of GNN, and I was the one who said, “Let’s support it with advertising.  Let’s get permission from the National Science Foundation to do that,” and, you know, and then along came a whole flood of entrepreneurs.  But before the entrepreneurs there were the hackers.

And right now, for example, the reason why we’re so excited about this Make space is ‘cause we see people hacking.  And when there’s a technology and it’s coming out and it’s basically only the big boys can play and you have to ante up lots of money, you know, go, “Okay, maybe that’s important somewhere, but it’s not important to us and our audience.”  What’s important to us is it’s accessible, and so we look for that hacker activity starting, 'cause then we know that’s the hotbed for the next wave of innovation.  So we see today, again, hackers playing with robots and sensors and stuff.  We see hackers playing with their heads and their bodies and we go, “Holy cow.”  Those are among the next big things.  And as I say, Slashdot probably covers that range better than any other blog.

Aaron Strout:             

Tim, this has been a fascinating conversation.  I greatly appreciate your time.

Tim O’Reilly:              

You’re very welcome.