Porträt: Tim O'Reilly

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He calls it the architecture of participation. In O'Reilly's world, sharing increases value - so much so that it becomes unthinkable to close off information or to adopt nonstandard proprietary systems. The result is a virtuous cycle where openness becomes the norm, encouraging even more participation.

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The crucial technologies that make this happen - the digital infrastructure that makes the online world a perpetual swap meet of goods and ideas - are the culmination of all the stuff he's been tracking, supporting, and popularizing for the past 20 years. After O'Reilly hosted his Web 2.0 Conference last autumn (an even bigger confab is planned for this October), digi-pundits began using the term Web 2.0 to describe the growing swarm of applications and Web sites that exploit collective- intelligence and participation. But they may as well call it Tim O'Reilly's Internet.

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The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog (1992) became a category-busting best-seller, establishing itself as "a 250,000-copies-a-year thing," O'Reilly says, at least until it became outdated in the mid-'90s. He saw the book not just as a tent pole for his business but as a chance to awaken the world to the Internet. He went on a press tour. He sent a copy to every member of Congress, and was invited to meet with House aides. Before addressing a huge group of them, he was taken aside by the House IT department. "I go into this little room, and it's like Three Days of the Condor," O'Reilly recalls. "This old guy in a three-piece suit and a cane says, 'We don't want you to get the aides too excited about the Internet, because we're not going to give it to them.' So I went out and got them excited anyway."

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GNN [Global Network Navigator] also collaborated on a directory of the Web created by two Stanford students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. At one point, they asked if GNN was interested in buying the venture - Yahoo! - outright. "I think they wanted a million dollars, and we didn't have a million dollars," O'Reilly says. (Yahoo! doesn't deny the discussion but says it didn't set a price.)

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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.

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Could it be that the Internet - or what O'Reilly calls Web 2.0 - is really the -successor to the human potential movement? If so, the new Esalen is his increasingly fabled Foo Camp, where 200 or so people - a gamut ranging from Amazon.com's- Jeff Bezos to BitTorrent's Bram Cohen- and random wizards doing VoIP hacks - are invited each year to the underpopulated Sebastopol campus to crash in empty offices or pitch tents in the backyard.

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Harnessing collective- intelligence.