By ELLEN LEE, San Francisco Chronicle

Mena Trott was in labor for 32 hours last fall before giving birth to a baby girl. To take her mind off the pain and pass the time, she walked around the hospital, listened to music.And blogged.

SAN FRANCISCO -- By members' own account, Maldroid went about its debut a little backward -- or maybe not in this age of digital media.

Once a day or so, Marcus Segal will take a break from his job at a San Mateo, Calif. technology company, nibble on a sandwich and fire up a three-minute online game of Scramble.And because he's playing the word game on Facebook, he can connect and challenge his far-flung friends, including his friend's mother, who is in her 60s, and his former Boggle partner in New York.

Yahoo! employees tend to land at rival Google for their next job. The median age for Facebook employees is 27. And Hewlett-Packard draws as many graduates from Bangalore University in India as it does from California's San Jose State and Stanford.

Starting Wednesday, Facebook users will be able to decide which friends can see certain details of their profiles, a new option that's part of a rollout of privacy tools designed to give members more control over how much personal information they share and with whom.

J.J. Caguin had held off on purchasing a high-definition DVD player until now. But with Blu-ray all but crowned as the next-generation DVD format last week, the 37-year-old is ready to go shopping.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Lawrence Lessig famously battled Mickey Mouse before the Supreme Court. And lost. But the fight illustrates how the Stanford law professor has played a pivotal role in shaping Internet law and in building a new approach to copyright rules in the digital era, whose spirit, after all, is the freedom of information.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A video podcast that talks frankly about sex. A 3-D computer game that sends teens on missions and, in the process, teaches them about safe sex and the consequences of sex. Text messages that answer frequently asked questions about condoms, pregnancy, sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases and abuse.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Now that the Consumer Electronics Show has packed up and left Las Vegas, attention is shifting to this week's Macworld Expo in San Francisco and Apple Inc.