The recent Adobe-Macromedia Edge Newsletter has an interesting interview with Tim O'Reilly. The whole conversation with Tim is very interesting. Tim speaks on everything from Google Book Search, PDF Safari Books, Google Wi-Fi initiative, Web 2.0, Flex, Where is PDF lacking and What skills are most important for developers. Here are some interesting exerpts:
Edge: Now that Adobe and Macromedia have merged, what do you think Adobe's contribution to Web 2.0 will be?
Tim O'Reilly: ..If I were Adobe, I'd be thinking hard about how to manage PDFs better. There's this enormous opportunity as people create things for print, to say, "Oh yes, we create them for online as well." If you're thinking about PDF, yes, you can put a PDF up on the web, but you can't put up a URL that points to page 134 of a 300-page PDF. We need to start thinking about those things. How do you point into these documents, how do you point into these rich media types?
Edge: How does O'Reilly Media use DRM?
Tim O'Reilly: At O'Reilly, we have our Safari online books formatted to include the ability to download the books in PDF. They're watermarked, but they're not protected in any other way. We also have some anti-spidering protection to try and prevent people from sucking down a lot of the content. Some people do anyway.
Edge: What skills are becoming more essential for application developer?
Tim O'Reilly: First, as I mentioned above, agility is important. The other skill that I think is really important is data management. I had a conversation with Hal Varian, the noted Berkeley economist, who also does consulting for Google. He made a comment that stuck with me: "SQL is the new HTML." I think database competency is going to be important because so many of the applications that matter today, and will matter tomorrow, are about managing data.
Related: Tim O'Reilly says Gentlemen Prefer PDFs
Read full interview at Adobe Edge Newsletter