Update: Check out the update here:
http://fyi.oreilly.com/2008/09/-update-the-september-issue.html

"If the do-it-yourself trend is a revolution, then Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly are its Tom Paines," writes reporter Elizabeth Corcoran in a recent Forbes.com story, Making Future Headlines.

Thomas Paine, if you recall, was America's cerebral, revolutionary activist and the author of a mightily influential 1776 pamphlet, "Common Sense," supporting the American colonies independence from Great Britain.

Like Paine, O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, and Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make, are "awfully good at spotting trends," writes Corcoran. "As the software industry began to gel in the mid-1980s, they wrote computer manuals, hawking their soft-cover books at conferences. The collaboration grew into a small trade press house now called O'Reilly Media. Their books became travel guides through the rough landscape of computerese: Perl, Python, JavaScript and the Internet itself. These were books for people-in-the-know, the antithesis of "Dummy" guides."

Continues Corocoan, "The books positioned O'Reilly and Dougherty at the front of every technical trend. "We didn't get to sell books; we sold a movement," says O'Reilly, who became the leading evangelist and public face of the company.

While the "playfulness of Make disguises a provocative and potentially disruptive trend: giving individuals the power to change hardware just like they do software," adds Corcoran.

Read the rest of Corcoran's story here. Also, check out O'Reilly and Dougherty in Forbe's photo feature on techno-wizards--"In Pictures: Eight People Inventing The Future."