Where would the people of the world be without published material? Hardly any information about anything would be exchanged even in today's modern society. Published material is so ubiquitous that you couldn't avoid it if you tried. The newspapers and websites you read, the billboards you see on the way to work, and even reports on your desk at work would all make this a futile attempt. As Sarah Milstein and Tim O'Reilly explain in this presentation, the published material we see today was not just invented recently, and in fact has been being constantly updated since the days of writing on clay tablets.
Milstein and O'Reilly also bring up a few issues with published materials today that are not new to our era either. Copyright issues are brought up in the time frame of Benjamin Franklin, and the idea of ease of publishing leading to fraudulent information is explained with respect to the early days of the first printing press (as well as connected to the Wikipedia of today). Publishing has a long and ever-advancing history, and as consumers of published information, we are all in a prime position to see what direction it will head in next.
Sarah Milstein is the Chief Publishing Evangelist for O'Reilly Media. Previously at O'Reilly she was Managing Editor, Senior Editor, and Editor, leading the development of the Missing Manuals, a bestselling series of computer books for non-geeks. She's also written for the series, co-authoring Google: The Missing Manual (1st ed 2004; 2nd ed 2006). Before joining O'Reilly in 2003, Sarah was a freelance writer and editor, and a regular contributor to The New York Times. She was also a program founder for Just Food, a local-food-and-farms non-profit, and co-founder of Two Tomatoes Records, a label that distributes and promotes the work of children's musician Laurie Berkner.
Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to publishing pioneering books like Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog (selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century), O'Reilly has also been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web.
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