Tim O’Reilly has been a trend spotter for many years. His accomplishments range from have a Technical Writing Empire, investments in del.icio.us, creation of arguably the first portal (Global Network Navigator), and lists of other accomplishments. The most successful recent venture is a wonderfully retro idea: Make, a quarterly print magazine in the spirit of Boy Scout DIY projects. The first issue, published in February, had articles on doing aerial photography with kites, making your own videocam stabilizer, and building a machine to read the magnetic stripes on credit cards. O’Reilly believes that the urge to hack stuff is “more common than we thought.” And it dovetails perfectly with the participation-based Internet he extols. The magazine has already exceeded his goal of 30,000 subscribers. He’s created a “Make Your Own Collegiate Text Book” site where universities can add chapters from different publishers including O’Reilly, Addison-Wesley Professional, Peachpit Press, New Riders, Prentice-Hall PTR, Sams, Que, Cisco Press, Sun Microsystems, and may more.

A great article was just posted in Wired about Tom O’Reilly

If you are interested in reading about the latest trends, keep your eye on Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular. Or just try a new site that incorporates all three of those sites in one location, http://diggdot.us/.