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Penelope Trunk helped convince me to take my current job at Wired News, and it was great advice — I love my job. As my friend, her advice is supportive, sympathetic, frank, and cuts through the crap: Just what you wish all of your friends’ advice would be like. As a writer, she delivers career […]

Om Malik and TheLadders.com CEO Mark Cenedella joined forces to throw a cocktail party at San Francisco’s Pier 38 Thursday evening. Was this a turning point for the boomlet of optimism and hope that has been tagged with the lame moniker of “web 2.0”? Maybe, but whether it’s the high water mark or th

MOFFETT FIELD, California — Twenty-year Jet Propulsion Laboratory veteran Charles White drove 350 miles from Pasadena to attend what amounted to a rave in Hangar 211 at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View on Friday night. It was worth it, he said. At Yuri’s Night Bay Area, rocket scientis

In the mountain of commentary that has been published about the Kathy Sierra affair on blogs and in mainstream publications, one fact has so far remained obstinately unconfirmed: Who was it that posted threatening messages and images on Sierra’s website and on two other blogs? Wired News interviewed

It’s not too late to get on the “web 2.0” bandwagon, says publishing magnate Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term. And if you’re wondering what it takes to build a web 2.0 startup, O’Reilly has just the conference for you — the Web 2.0 Expo. O’Reilly Media and CMP are co-hosting the conference, which r

Jonathan Abrams’ last startup, Friendster, was one of the first social-networking companies to attract an audience of users numbering in the millions. Launched in 2003, the site grew quickly through word of mouth, as people rushed to connect with their friends online. Abrams became one of the most v

At Microsoft’s Silicon Valley headquarters Monday evening, a couple hundred entrepreneurs and investors gathered to schmooze, eat mashed-potato-and-roast-beef hors-d’oeuvres from martini glasses, and spend a few desultory moments looking over the eight companies on display in the middle of the meeti

If you wanted to catch a few particles of comet dust speeding through the vacuum of space at 6 kilometers per second — without damaging or destroying those particles — how would you do it? Faced with exactly this problem, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory focused on aerogel — an extremely

For most people, open source is a synonym for free software. But for programmers, open source is about sharing code, building on the work of others and not having to reinvent the wheel — at least, that’s the ideal. In practice, code reuse remains very low, because it’s often too hard for programmers

Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin — but the market has never gone away entirely, despite years of tepid sales and failed predictions. Now a new device from Sony is generating buzz worthy of a Stephen King novel. Some people are even wonderi