If you don’t know Tim O’Reilly, you should. He’s been a driving force behind the commercial Internet, Web 2.0, blogging and online bookselling. His mission is simple: to change the world. And he certainly seems to be doing it.

By Jim Calder

Being Tim O’Reilly

The 1999 film “Being John Malkovich” may have lured many to the box office with its plot of a secret portal where people can slip into actor John Malkovich’s mind, but many in the publishing industry might rather spend a few moments inside Tim O’Reilly’s mind. There’s no portal for that yet, but some wouldn’t put it past O’Reilly Media’s scale of limitless possibilities of tomorrow. However, here O’Reilly gives us the next best thing: a personal glimpse into how he manages his company, his biggest challenges and the strategies that have made O’Reilly Media successful.

Day-to-Day Operations: “I have the luxury of having a brilliant COO, Laura Baldwin, who manages the day-to-day of the company far better than I ever did. As a result, I’m able to spend most of my time evangelizing big ideas, cheerleading and exploring new possibilities. I spend a lot of time on the road speaking at conferences, meeting with companies on projects with innovative new technologies.”

The Biggest Challenge for O’Reilly Media: “The transition from print to online. While we’re making some great progress, it’s still a tough time. Between asymmetric competition from online information sources, wide availability of used books, and the disappearance of independent bookstores and the slowdown of expansion of the chains, print book publishing is now a slow-growth industry.

“And the problem is that, at least so far, as sales volumes go down, manufacturing costs go up. So there is a tipping point at which books that were formerly profitable become unprofitable. If people choose online over print, that’s fine, but it makes the economics of print worse, and navigating past that tipping point is an economic challenge. We can see the promised land, but it takes smart, efficient publishing to survive the transition to the future online world.”

Search Engine Optimization: “As far as SEO goes, it is indeed very important, but … we actually don’t do very much with it. We have the luxury of getting a huge amount of ‘link love’ from the ’Net already, based on our long history as a ’Net pioneer and information source for many of the innovators on the ’Net … and Google tends to find us pretty quickly. … You could think of us as ‘natural’ search engine optimizers. We try to create online content that is really valuable to our readers, early and often, and as a result, get them to push us up in search engine results. We’ve often thought we should get more explicit about SEO, but to date, we haven’t really done so.”

Conferences: “Given that our mission is ‘changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators,’ conferences are a great way to achieve that. We can introduce new topics in a conference session that would never support a book. We can bring people together. We can shape the dialogue. I don’t think that every publisher can manage a successful conference business, but if you look at today’s most successful publishers, many of them have multichannel empires.”

New Service: “We launched a program called Short Cuts, in which we publish and sell online shorts—chapter-length pieces on emerging or very specific technologies. We’re getting a lot of traction with that program. It lets us publish on topics that would never justify print distribution.”

Brand Importance: “A brand is a promise to the reader, and a huge part of what makes a brand successful is not its iconography, but the fact that it embraces some kind of big idea, and that it is true to that idea—so that, over time, the brand and the idea become inseparable. Ideally, the idea is bigger than the brand, and a lot of people want to be part of it. Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, once described this strategy to me as ‘Find a parade and get in front of it.’”

Investing in the Future: “We do continue to invest in our XML publishing processes, and we’ve spent the better part of a million dollars in the past couple of years building some next generation XQuery-based tools that give us even more flexibility in our publishing.

SafariU, our service that allows professors to build custom textbooks using any of the books in the Safari database, is one of the new applications we’ve been able to produce as a result of that investment, but it’s the first of many—stay tuned to Labs.OReilly.com and Safari itself for hints of new services to come.”

What Publishers Should Be Focusing On: “There is so much that publishers need to know: how to effectively apply new Web 2.0 concepts like harnessing collective intelligence, loosely coupled Web services, tag clouds [can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a Web site], and mashups [a Web site or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience]; content generation technologies like blogs, wikis, and crowd-sourcing; content management systems; production workflows for XML publishing; real-time data analysis driving publishing decisions; new presentation layer tools like AJAX (and the latest from Adobe, like Apollo); search engine optimization … the list goes on and on.”

Technology is fundamentally transforming publishing. From generating ideas to packaging information to delivering products and beyond, everything is changing. Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, the renowned Silicon Valley-based computer/technology publisher, believes that many publishers are woefully unprepared. His company, one of the leading computer-book publishing companies in the world, is at the forefront of the technologies that have directly shaped publishing of the past, present and future.

When I spoke with O’Reilly, he was getting ready to board a plane to New York City to keynote Google’s “Unbound” conference on Jan. 18. The conference was billed as “a day for examining how the book business has changed and how it will continue to evolve.”

Google isn’t the only one knocking down his door for speaking engagements—the company’s founder makes for the perfect expert to talk on the industry’s ongoing evolution. Though sometimes, his cutting-edge insights can be a little challenging for some to follow.

“I spoke recently at The Stanford Publishing Course, and O’Reilly editor Sarah Milstein, who attended, reported back, ‘They loved your talk, but in follow-up conversations during the rest of the week, I realized that many of them didn’t really know what you were talking about,’” he says.

At O’Reilly, the employees tend to be ahead of the curve in their way of thinking, but not so far ahead of the curve that they believe they can do it all alone. This is one of the reasons why they are trying to bridge the gap and help educate others.

“We’re far from always ahead of the curve. But when we are, it’s because of a philosophy that I call ‘watching the Alpha geeks,’” O’Reilly says. “That is, rather than chasing ‘the hot topic du jour,’ we find interesting people, and ask them what they are finding new and interesting.”

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