In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with two of the program chairs for the upcoming O’Reilly Fluent Conference (July 11-14 in San Jose), Kyle Simpson and Tammy Everts. Simpson is co-author of the "HTML 5 Cookbook," and the author of the "You Don’t Know JS" series of books. Everts is the chief experience officer at SpeedCurve and the author of "Time is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance."

Kyle Simpson and Tammy Everts on the Challenges of the Modern Web

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Kyle Simpson and Tammy Everts on the Challenges of the Modern Web

O'Reilly Radar