Tim O'Reilly again presented the O'Reilly Radar - a talk on how O'Reilly Media watches the "alpha geeks" - but since not everyone has heard the philosophy, here's the thread from tonight's keynote at O'Reilly Etech:
O'Reilly looks for interesting technologies, and the people 'innovating from the edge.' This isn't an old phenomenon, and it isn't limited to technology. Just watch the Lords of Dogtown to see how homebrew hackers transformed the skateboard, and as a result an entire industry crystallized. Disruption, exponential adoption, and grassroots support are all hallmarks of the technologies that draw O'Reilly's attention. And ideally, these technologies will inspire passion and have deeper social implications.
Pattern recognition is a fair mantra. Information businesses,
software as a service, collective intelligence, etc. are all paradigms
that could only exist on the Internet because the Internet is about
forming these kinds of connections. In these Internet applications,
competitive advantage emerges when users will help to create data.
O'Reilly showed a terrific graph in which most of the top ten sites on
the Internet (like Yahoo! and Time Warner) have tens of thousands of
employees. The sole exception was Craigslist - a site totally dependent upon user-contributed content - and which has only 18 people on staff.
Amazon.com tries to incorporate the human element with its Mechanical Turk project. O'Reilly believes that this explicit use of people is less impactful than you find in implicit applications such as Flickr. Same thing with Digg and Slashdot
- these sites rely upon their users implicitly. Users like using these
sites because they feel it makes them more aware, more in tune with the
world and more informed. Users aren't interested in artificial
intelligence per se, but they are fascinated by intelligence automation.
Taking hacks into the physical world is another phenomenon that O'Reilly notes. Everything from Make magazine projects to Brad Templeton's open source phone sitting unwired (and functioning) in the middle of the Burning Man
playa. I don't know if this is really a trend yet, but I hope that it
becomes one - I think that as a people we're getting intellectually
lazy. How many kids do you know that get science project kits in the
mail, or that have figured out how to make their own rocket or radio?
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys technology etech o'reilly alpha geek
