Friday, August 15, 2008

A shout out to Dale and "Make"

If the do-it-yourself trend is a revolution, then Dale Dougherty (left) and Tim O'Reilly (right) are its Tom Paines.

Their three-year-old quarterly magazine, Make, is the DIY manifesto, urging readers to unleash their creativity with little more than a screwdriver and a soldering iron. Want an electric guitar? Start with a cigar box. Need an aerial picture of your house? Try rigging a camera to a kite.

The playfulness of Make, however, disguises a provocative and potentially disruptive trend: giving individuals the power to change hardware just like they do software. "Why can't I do to my car what I do to my computer?" asks Dougherty, Make's publisher.