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I was listening to MGMT's "Kids" today on iTunes, and by the end of the song I found that I had shelled out roughly $6 for a few more songs by Arcade Fire, Sonic Youth, Band of Horses, and MGMT.

All of those songs are available for $0.00 on LimeWire, which I have installed on my computer, but which I haven't used in at least a year. I haven't needed to. Everything I want to buy is a click away and, better yet, as happened Monday, Apple keeps helping me find more things to … Read more

They say that many people now get much of their news from satire. Which might make you wonder where they get their satire from.

However, researchers at the Ohio State University wanted to get into the bowels of the political satire phenomenon and were perhaps a little surprised at how it is all being digested.

They subjected 332 people of varying political bents to a three-minute clip of "The Colbert Report." They then produced their own report, fetchingly entitled "Political Ideology and The Motivation to See What You Want to See in the Colbert Report."

The … Read more

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica took a look (slides below) at the developers behind the most successful applications on the iPhone and found that electronic books may be the killer app, simply because there is a such of wealth of offerings.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Apple's App Store features about 40,000 different apps. Based on recent data, game developers have on average, 2.3 apps in the store while typical e-book vendors have 18 apps, which obviously stacks the odds in their favor.

What's interesting about this is that this news suggests that the iPhone really is a … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The floor of the exposition hall at this year's Web 2.0 Expo has been a little bit lethargic, to say the least. "It's a lot emptier than last year," said one representative from a social gaming company that had set up a booth. "I think the 'Web 2.0' thing has become a bit of a stigma."

Indeed, these days the term goes hand-in-hand with broken business models and overblown expectations, as much as it does with innovation. With the economy in shambles, attendance at the semiannual conference is down. The show … Read more

I got an e-mail from the folks over at O'Reilly Media mentioning that keynotes and other presentations from the company's ETech 2009 conference, held earlier this month, were now online at the ETech 2009 site. I missed that show, but I was interested in one of the keynotes, so I surfed on over to take a look.

The keynote I was looking for was indeed online: Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and formerly CTO of the One Laptop Per Child organization, talking about "Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing." You can watch a video of the presentation … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--I'm staring at a table covered in circuitry, a solderless "breadboard," a bunch of wire, an antenna, and some other components--all the things I've been given to build a rudimentary RFID reader--and I'm having serious thoughts about whether I'm in the right room.

I've certainly used RFID before--tiny radio frequency ID tags are increasingly showing up in everything from grocery store items to hospital wristbands to lift tickets. But the sum total of electronics that I've made in my life is, I'm now reminding myself, zero.

And yet, … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--On the day that the Dow sank below 7,000 for the first time since 1997, a panel of venture capitalists told attendees at Demo 2009 what most people already know. This is an extremely challenging environment for raising money.

But challenging doesn't mean impossible. There are still some opportunities for both entrepreneurs and investors.

The panel, which was moderated by Matt Marshall of VentureBeat consisted of Christine Herron of First Round Capital, David Hornik of August Capital, Bryce T. Roberts of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Eric Tilenius of Tilenius Investments.

Tilenius said that "… Read more

Allvoices.com has launched a Credibility Meter across its citizen news service. According to the company, the Credibility Meter will be placed at the bottom of every news story to help readers determine the trustworthiness of a particular citizen journalist's postings on the site. The final determination of an author's credibility is based on how well the community likes content from the author, how well the community enjoys a particular report, how many contributors are writing on the same topic, and how many mainstream sources have supporting content about the report. The Credibility Meter is live now.

TripAdvisor … Read more

O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly makes a provocative claim relative to Amazon's successful e-book reader, the Kindle: embrace open e-book standards, or be run over by them.

It's a bold prediction, considering what Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone. It may also be wrong.

Indeed, though I'd like O'Reilly to be right on this, I think that the iPhone, which he uses to prove his point, actually demonstrates against it. O'Reilly writes:

(Apple) seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to … Read more