Yesterday Napster introduced a new free interactive ad-supported version of its digital music service at Napster.com. The site now offers a Web-based cross-platform music player that provides access to its catalog of over two million songs, which users can play for free up to five times. The company also offers ad-free premium subscription versions of its service, ranging from $9.95...

ETech is over, so I'll take a look back on some of the meta-trends of the conference, gender balance in the attendees and covering topics Dick Cheney style.

I expected to dread a lot of what I'd encounter in politics, figuring it's where the worst people you knew in high school went. You know, the manipulative weasels fascinated by power. But I've been surprised by how deeply interesting and satisfying the experience has been so far, and by how many people I've met who are still motivated by service. The intersection of technology and politics is one of the most fascinating areas of all,

Meridith Patterson's presentation on her Query By Example extension for Postgres showed how to make Postgres support advanced features for selecting and ranking data according to a given example. And even selecting and ranking data that is unlike a given example.

Danah Boyd takes a look at g/localization, a nasty term used to describe cultural clashes between global and local cultures. What happens when a local culture with one morality clashes with another culture of another morality in an global online space? Danah studied this problem and suggests a few courses of action to avoid these problems.

Day two of ETech started off with a powerful demonstration of future user interfaces. The Multi-Touch display screen demonstration showed how using touch screen displays with more than one finger opens up the the world of user interfaces. This exciting innovation will require us to reconsider our core assumptions of user interfaces.

On the first day of ETech, Marc Hedlund shared a load of valuable proverbs with geeks aspiring to become entrepreneurs. Rather than going back to school to get an MBA, Marc suggests a number of things to consider if you have a tech background and are thinking of starting your own company.

I've discovered many things after producing 20 podcasts on The Digital Story. So I've posted those lessons on Mac DevCenter in a piece titled What I've Learned After 20 Podcasts....

Sun has created quite a ruckus by allowing people to test out their new T2000 server. But is it for real?

I think every programmer has their own internal Oscar and Felix. I've heard myself take both the Oscar and Felix sides of many design debates. But like most programmers, I tend to let one of them express himself a bit more.