Tim O’Reilly: Technology and the Future of the Newspaper

This morning I attended the NY Times TimesOpen API day. I will have a post later today with my recap but I wanted to share my keynote presentation notes from Tim O’Reilly now. Tim presented on the topic of, "Technology and the Future of the Newspaper." While the presentation was a bit on the long side, it was a very good discussion. Unfortunately I was not allowed to videotape the session but the Times did and they will let me know when the recording is available.

Here are my notes from Tim’s speech:

• Hackers help push things forward
• Google is the best example of Web 2.0 because of their pagerank technology – made it social by looking at linking patterns
• his most important point of the discussion "what are you throwing away" – google thought about links while no one else did – what about other pieces of data are we throwing away that a business can be built around?
• "extract meaning from data"
• "Don’t show it to me again" – what he means here is that when he visits the NY Times home page, he wants to say to a story "i saw this already dont show it to me again"
• With regards to social networks – think about when you should lead and when you should follow
• Self-interest of bloggers is what made and continues to build Techmeme
• News will be located based on the devices we use (shows example of pizza in the exact spot he was at)
• Google Maps API – most successful API
• Don’t wait for some company to do it, just hack it – this is in regards to having an idea and not waiting for it to be done for you
• Tim sees many business models coming for journalism – he didn’t share any specifics

I was able to capture the slides from his discussion – click any of them to view the larger version: