Steve O'Keefe

Steve O'Keefe was an important early pioneer of the effort to develop the commercial potential of the World Wide Web.

As an employee of the mail order publishing firm Loompanics, O'Keefe was one of the first people to publicize and sell books on the Internet. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, approached him for advice when he was formulating the concept behind what was to become the world's largest eCommerce site.

Among other innovations, O'Keefe was apparently the first person to put a book publisher's catalog on the Internet, a task he carried out for Loompanics. The catalog took the form of descriptions of 150 books distributed using the gopher protocol, a popular hypertext format that preceded the web.

In 1996, John Wiley & Sons published O'Keefe's first book "Publicity on the Internet", one of the first professional guides to online marketing and the first specifically on the subject of promoting books. An updated version of the book "A Complete Guide to Internet Publicity" was published in 2002.

In 2001, O'Keefe founded Patron Saint Productions, a New Orleans-based online publicity firm. He was a one of the founders of the International Association of Online Communicators and is a faculty member at Tulane University. In 2004, he began AuthorViews, the pioneering effort to put video of authors talking about their books online. A survivor of Hurricane Katrina, O'Keefe re-opened his New Orleans office in 2006 after a brief resettlement period in Tennessee.

References

*O'Keefe, Steve (1996). "Publicity on the Internet" John Wiley & Sons.
*O'Keefe, Steve (2002). "A Complete Guide to Internet Publicity" John Wiley & Sons.