Tech guru challenges next generation to get serious

He is urging young entrepreneurs and engineers to stop making some of the sillier software that lets Facebook users throw virtual sheep at their friends or download virtual beer on iPhones, and instead start making a real difference in the world.

He says it's not just the right thing to do, but also the smart thing to do -- especially as the credit crunch spreads to Silicon Valley, venture financing becomes scarce and start-ups have to retrench.

When this grizzled, 54-year-old tech-industry veteran talks, Silicon Valley tends to listen, if only to argue with him.

After all, this is the guy who understood the power and significance of the Internet before most people were aware it existed. In 1992, he published "The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog," the first popular book about the medium, which was later selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the 20th century.

He now runs O'Reilly Media, an influential book publishing empire in Sebastopol, Calif., which has snagged a significant share of the computer book market with series such as "The Missing Manual" and "Hacks."

Early this decade, O'Reilly helped coin the term "Web 2.0" to refer to the current phase of the Internet, which relies on collective intelligence and action from the bottom up (think social networks such as Facebook and photo-sharing sites such as Flickr).

He is perhaps best known for putting on packed conferences headlined by some of the tech industry's brightest. Now he is using those conferences as a bully pulpit.

The theme of his Web 2.0 conference here next month is "Web meets world." It will showcase activists such as former Vice President Al Gore, cyclist-philanthropist Lance Armstrong and Larry Brilliant, who, as head of Google.org, has reinvented philanthropy by setting up a foundation without tax-exempt status to invest in for-profit and nonprofit efforts.

O'Reilly argues that Silicon Valley has strayed from the passion and idealism that fuel innovation to instead follow what he calls the "mad pursuit of the buck with stupider and stupider ideas."