O'Reilly News

Scott Berkun on How to Get People to Pay Attention - Speaking is Not Trivial

2009-12-17T18:09:57Z

The Importance of What You Say — "People laugh when I tell them I'm a professional speaker. They assume at first that I'm some kind of self-help guru or infomercial star," writes Scott Berkun in a new O'Reilly Insights column on Forbes.com. In the column, the bestselling author of the newly released Confessions of a Public Speaker discusses how to choose what to say and which angle to take. Read more.

Register Now - Free Upcoming Webcasts - DRBD and MySQL, Cloud Security, IT and Sustainable Business, Entity Framework 4, and Social Media Marketing

2009-12-17T16:22:59Z

What people are says about our webcasts: "Content superb of course. But I also loved its "personality" - friendly, casual, expert, geeky: perfect!"
-- Heather Young

Our upcoming webcasts include:

Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Featured Ignite Video: The Plight of the Digital Chicken - Ignite Show Episode 42

2009-12-17T16:03:53Z

Subscribe to this video podcast series via iTunes. Or, visit the O'Reilly Media area at iTunes to find other podcasts from O'Reilly.

Four short links: 17 December 2009 - Desirable Devices, iPhone Piracy Numbers, Internet Trend Numbers, Value of Privacy

2009-12-17T11:00:00Z

iPhone Piracy -- over 70% of submitted game scores for this game (Tap Fu) were from pirated copies. Having seen our data and the fact that not a single pirate bought Tap-Fu after playing it, these arguments all sound a bit delusional to me. It seems like an attempt at trying to be legitimate while hiding the real reason. They should just change their page to say "We pirate because we can". That seems to be a much more honest statement based on the data we've seen. (via timoreilly on Twitter) This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Sneak Peek: "First Look: Microsoft Office 2010" - Limited Time! Download this Free Ebook

2009-12-16T20:28:21Z

"First Look: Microsoft Office 2010," by Katherine Murray, offers 14 chapters of early content. This free sneak peek introduces you to changes in Office 2010 and shows you how to make the most of the new features. Download the sneak peek here. Find more information about this free download on the Microsoft Press blog.

'Twas the Holiday Season in the Digital Age

2009-12-16T19:00:00Z

'Twas a night during the holidays, when all through the house
Everyone was connecting and using their mouse.
The screens were alight and holding their stares,
While holiday music from iTunes loudly blared.

The children were chatting and texting their friends,
Searching for YouTube clips they just had to send;
And Daddy with his iPhone and I with my RIM
Were synching our calendars to meet at the gym.

Global Ignite Week: 40+ Ignites Coming Next March

2009-12-16T12:58:06Z

Just over three years ago, Bre Pettis and I threw a geek night in our home town. We called it Ignite Seattle. Since that first amazing night in 2006, Ignite has spread to over 60 cities, bringing together thousands of geeks and generating hundreds of videos of Ignite talks. This March, it gets much, much bigger. O'Reilly is launching the first-ever Global Ignite Week, to bring together as many local Ignites as possible.

Four short links: 16 December 2009 - Global Broadband, A/B Testing Stats, Streaming with SSDs, Online Videos Sell

2009-12-16T11:00:00Z

Videos Sell More Product -- Zappos sells 6-30% more merchandise when accompanied by video demos. By the end of next year, Zappos will have ten full working video studios, with the goal of producing around 50,000 product videos by 2010, up from the 8,000 videos they have on the site today (via johnclegg on Twitter) This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Using R to answer a football question

2009-12-16T04:30:34Z

Last Monday night, I was watching the Ravens playing the Packers at Green Bay. Mostly, I was watching penalties. This game featured an astounding number of penalty calls: 23 calls, 310 yards. I wondered whether penalties really affect the outcome of football games. Here's what I figured out in 15 minutes, with a little help from R.

First Look at nook: Not Encouraging

2009-12-15T20:28:31Z

We (finally) received our nooks (pre-ordered quite some time ago), and the early results are ... disappointing. Loading one (any) of our EPUB ebooks causes the nook to hang, and the book never opens. I tried loading a number of O'Reilly Media titles that are valid and work on the Sony Reader and every other ePub device. The Nook only brought up the "Formatting" message, and then hung. Only a full restart would bring it back. This is an extremely serious problem.

Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?

2009-12-15T20:00:00Z

In light of the company's past consumer-unfriendly initiatives, Facebook's recent 'privacy' settings change should serve as a wake up call to its 350M users that they are entrusting a Fox to guard the Hen House; a truth that is destined to erupt into a crisis for the company.

What's New in O'Reilly Answers - Interacting with government, Building a baseball database, Windows Live Apps, and much more!

2009-12-15T16:15:31Z

Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Government 2.0: Five Predictions for 2010-12

2009-12-15T15:35:30Z

Under no pressure from anyone, I’ve forced this obligatory “end of year predictions” post upon myself. People always ask me where I think Government 2.0 is going anyway, I may as well get some writing mileage out of it, right? So, here are some non-exhaustive, somewhat creative, and entirely debatable trends and ideas that I foresee taking shape in the next three years or so:

Local governments as experiments
The rise of Citizen 2.0
Mobile devices as primary devices
Ubiquitous crude video content
Always on-the-record

Four short links: 15 December 2009 - Open Source Imagery Analysis, GPL Lawsuits, Small World, Regina v Internet

2009-12-15T11:00:00Z

Best Buy, Samsung, And Westinghouse Named In SFLC Suit Today (Linux Weekly News) -- the Software Freedom Law Center is suing them for selling GPL-derived products without offering the source. They've been unresponsive when contacted outside the legal system. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Innovation from the Edges: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps - Developer Challenge offers big prizes for best apps using new APIs

2009-12-14T15:00:00Z

Two enduring tenets of Web 2.0 are "A platform beats an application every time" and "All the smart people don't work for you." Online payment giant PayPal took those bits of wisdom to heart and recently announced the PayPal X APIs, a new group of developer APIs designed to enable new applications that can more tightly integrate with PayPal services. To encourage developers to create some awesome applications with the APIs, PayPal is offering prizes $100,000 and $50,000 (in cash plus waived transaction fees) for the best new applications. We caught up with PayPal's director for their Developer Network, Naveed Anwar, and he filled us in on what the new PayPal APIs bring to the table for application designers.