A lot changed in the way we curate and consume news this year, primarily due to the explosion of Twitter and it's ripple effect across all media. As alt-media ourselves, we had to deal with the formidable competition of the real time web and its ability to instantly inform and entertain. We now live in a world where Twitter executives can conclude that Puff Daddy isn't "strategic enough" to take seriously and rockstars like former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic are able throw in their two cents about file-sharing and garner a prize headline slot on San Francisco technology blog Techmeme.
As Novoselic wrote in the Seattle Weekly, when he compared the creative and media industries to technology in order to drum up a call for a better way to monetize content, "Most musicians, artists, and filmmakers don't have the backing of Google (YouTube) and venture capitalists (Twitter)."
In other words, the media landscape has shifted and taken our tradition of pop-culture coverage right along with it.
If you can't beat them, join them: The St.Louis Cardinals skipper provided much blog fodder when he sued Twitter back in May, and then in a somewhat suspect move, joined the service after the legal claim was dropped. Read more.
9. There Goes the Neighborhood: How Foursquare is Subtly Threatening Your Anonymity
With the ability to see who else is checked into a venue, people you haven't chosen to be friends with now
have access to your location. Which, not to exaggerate, can be seen as potentially
threatening at worst and mildly creepy at best, especially in the web celebrity-ridden San Francisco tech community. Read more.
8. Seven Social Media Snafus to Avoid for Sensible Online Citizenship
Houston educates its locals on how to be part of a global community: If you really want to be a citizen of an online, global
community, you'd better act communal, dammit. And it would behoove you
to keep a few key social graces in mind. Read more.
7. Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey Launching New Start-Up with St. Louisan
Jim McKelvey
Twitter creator Jack Dorsey is from St. Louis and chose the Midwestern city as a hub for his new promising start-up, Square: "I came
back to St. Louis to find the next thing, and I found it." Read more.
Valley startups receive the same invasive scrutiny as Hollywood stars;
the Twitter document leak revealed a lot about the company's Hollywood strategy, namely that they have one. Read more.
5. The Great Google Wave Spaz-Out of '09
Like the rest of the country, people in St. Louis went nuts for invites to a service that eventually became a ghost-town: Twitter went crazy with otherwise self-respecting geeks begging anyone
who claimed to get extra invites to please pass one along to them. Read more.
4. Chris Strouth, Scott Pakudaitis Share a Twitter Kidney
Strouth put out a call via Twitter for an organ donor in February and Scott Pakudaitis offered to help. Imagine this happening a year ago. Read more.
3. Twitter is Launching Its Own Fledgling Wine Label
Forget drinking the company Kool-Aid. Twitter employees will soon be drinking the company wine. Read more.
2. What Would 9-11 Be Like in the Age of Social Media?
This realtime 24-7 Internet did not exist in 2001. We had the earliest
versions of social media, instant messaging and blogs. But we had
nowhere near the household use of many-to-many communication channels
like Twitter and text messages. For the most part we spent 9-11
watching CNN. The Web in '09 is more about doing rather than watching.
Twitter asks, "What are you doing RIGHT NOW?" Read more.
1. The Internet at 40: Its Top Ten Achievements
The Internet is now middle-aged. Let's hope it doesn't buy an overpriced car and start dating younger women. Read more.
Here's to another year (or forty) of being a unique local voice, online and off ...
What do you get when your party hosts include DJs from Tormenta Tropical, Lazer Sword, and Ghosts on Tape? You get a little Icee Hot. That's the name of a promising new club night curated by Ghosts, Disco Shawn of Tormenta, Low Limit of Lazer Sword, and Rollie Fingers.
The aim, says Shawn (an occasional SF Weekly contributor) is to bring the new sounds coming out of the UK to San Francisco. That means a lot of "classic house, 2-step, UK Funky, and hints of dubstep" together with all those genres I swear they just sit around and make up at XLR8R (where Shawn is an editor) just to make the rest of us feel so last week.
The first edition of Icee Hot goes down on Saturday, Jan. 23, and continues every 4th Saturday of the month 222 Hyde.
Los Angeles hip-hop act Candy's .22 doesn't sport your typical rapper style. These dudes have a lotta hair and tattoos covering their necks, their look more grunge than gangsta. But they're good with the lyrics, and there's a darkness to their stories that's fitting of an emcee named Barfly. He and partner in beats and rhymes Existero spend this clip for "Streetlights" cruising L.A. They talk about a girl with toilet paper stuck to her stiletto heel and an addict's issues stuck to her lifestyle, getting all introspective and stuff.
fake virtual friends, and completely doing away with your Web2.0 alterego" I don't think I'm ready to off my profiles just yet. But I absolutely love the idea that this service is out there. Using it must feel like doing one of those movie moves where you swipe all the crap off your desk in one grand swoop. Only in this case, the 'crap' is Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook. Even if W2SM is a joke, it's a damn good prank on the system regardless.
winds, brass and percussion." Can't wait for that one.
Brain Farts @ Lookout
It isn't every day that you feel a little bit smarter after spending a couple of hours with a drag queen. Brain Farts, however, calls upon any of you eager to test your trivia skills to do so in the presence of two wise-cracking glamazon hosts. Ever well-versed in the latest pop-cultural gossip, Pollo del Mar and BeBe Sweetbriar can also dish out questions on history, art, and the purely random that will challenge even the most inveterate trivia buff.
Expect all of the regular trivia night amenities at this Lookout weekly -- drink specials, bar food, blood-thirsty competitive guests -- plus the sort of spirited crowd that makes gay bars and drag shows such a social delight. Winning teams take home CDs, DVDs, or other random crap, but the true sense of pride comes with knowing what Angela's son's name was on Who's the Boss, how many bones babies have when they're born, and the name of the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way. If you answered "Jonathon, a lot, and Delaware," you've probably had one too many vodka tonics, and you had better not shout out the answers, or you can count on a little drag wrath. Then again, drag wrath is most of the fun. (7:30 p.m., free)
For more calendar suggestions for tonight and this week, click here.
SF native The Genie spent three years in the subways of Montreal creating his "scratch guitar" style before bringing it back to SF to perfect it. Working with nothing but a couple of loop pedals, a guitar, and occasionally an iPod, Genie makes a hybrid of original music and covers. He produces live electronica, hip-hop, and psychedelic surf-rock in what is part performance and part what he calls "analog DJing."
The Genie is between albums now, but he tours endlessly around the country, striving to add something new to his concerts. Local Frequency sat down with The Genie in his Bernal Heights home to talk about world affairs, loop pedals, and feet appreciation.
If you could describe your sound as a San Francisco neighborhood, which one would it be?
The Genie: It would have to be a hybrid of all the neighborhoods. I've grown up in the city, and I've played in them all. I've tailored my act to various audiences, and I've found I can hit someone on some level that they may not have thought possible. I've got to break down a lot of barriers, that's my drive, that's what keeps me going,
You coined the "scratch guitar" style. Can you explain exactly what it is?
TG: The word itself I'm borrowing from the DJ language, in the sense that what you hear is me scratching, mixing. It's also a play on words because I make everything from scratch, live. I do a variation of things. For example, I may start with a guitar riff - loop that. Then I may beatbox on top of it, and loop again. Other guitar elements are then added and played on top of what's there. Basically I use the loop pedal as an instrument. I have about an 8-second window or less to record a beat and play it back, before doing something else.
