Wired profiles Tim O’Reilly, one of the originators of the Web 2.0 meme:
O’Reilly’s radar is legendary. It works on country roads and on the information sea. It told him there was a market for consumer-friendly computer manuals and that he could build a great business publishing them. It helped him understand the significance of the World Wide Web before there were browsers to surf it. And it led him to identify and proselytize technologies like peer-to-peer, syndication, and Wi-Fi before most people had even heard of them at all. As a result, “Tim O’Reilly’s radar” is kind of a catchphrase in the industry.
Yet O’Reilly himself has operated for years under the radar. Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing -company. It has a 15 percent share of the $400 million -computer-book market but casts a much bigger shadow.
