Tech expert Tim O'Reilly encourages youth to get serious and make a real difference to the world.

Silicon Valley insiders call it the O'Reilly Radar: Tim O'Reilly's (right) uncanny ability to spot a technology revolution before it happens. But lately the entrepreneur, investor and book publisher has been busier trying to incite the next one.

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 fruit juice on iPhones, and to start making a real difference in the world.

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

When this grizzled, 54-year-old tech-industry veteran talks, Silicon Valley listens, 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, O'Reilly published The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog, the first popular book about the medium, which was later selected by 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 house empire in Sebastopol, 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. He is perhaps best known for putting on packed conferences headlined by some of the tech industry's brightest people. Now he is using those conferences as a bully platform.

The theme of his Web 2.0 conference this month was "Web Meets World".

It showcased activists such as former Vice President Al Gore, cyclist-turned-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 fuels innovation to follow instead what he calls the "mad pursuit of the buck with stupider and stupider ideas".

Flush with money and opportunity following the post-dot-com resurgence, he says, some entrepreneurs cocoon in a "reality bubble", insulated from poverty, disease, global warming and other problems that are gripping planet Earth. He argues that they should follow the model of some of the world's most successful technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which sprang from their founders' efforts to "work on stuff that matters".