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.

This is awesome. The perennial question is "what is the videoblogging business model?"

Well here's one of them: build an audience of over 100,000 viewers then sell one million ad impressions... on ebay.

I've snapshotted the ebay link here ; the ebay link will go away after a while.

Yet another phishing email arrives, and it's bugging me more and more just to hit delete or the Spam button. I'd like a toolbar item (or a Favorite to add to my browser toolbar) that does something a little more useful with them--any suggestions?