It was a normal day on Twitter. New Media and Interactive Consultant Kyra Reed was going about her day (it was Reed who turned The Roxy into a Web 2.0 success story). On Twitter, she chatted with friends as she was at home. Then, all of the sudden at 5:02 p.m., Ron Myers at the Los Angeles Fire Department tweets a structure fire on the 1000 block of Laguna Ave. "Single family home with fire......

This upcoming weekend is probably the biggest weekend the LA Derby Dolls have had so far. In a first tournament of its kind, the best skaters from Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange County are having it out on a banked track. Not only will there be tons of games throughout Saturday and Sunday, there will be bands, food, beer and general awesomeness. What the Derby Dolls do is very special and unique to Los......

Nic Adler (left), Mario Maglieri, and Lou Adler at the House of Blues. The elder Adler was honored along with fellow Sunset Strip icons Maglieri and Elmer Valentine on the eve of the 1st Sunset Strip Music Festival. | Photo via The Roxy. Nic Adler grew up at The Roxy. His father, Lou Adler, opened the club the year Nic was born. He would spend his afternoons after school at the club and grew......

It's the usual daily shakings here and there. If you were in Santa Monica yesterday and thought you felt something, you might have. There were three mini shakes. Tip of the day: There has been talk about using Twitter during emergencies. While cell phone use takes up bandwidth, texting does not, therefore helping save the cellular network from crashing.......

iPhone photo taken yesterday by Sean Percival via Flickr New Rules: Taking photos while driving: legal. Linking to said photo on Twitter while driving: legal Shooting video of sticking foot out window while driving and texting: legal (though not possible with iPhone) Putting phone to ear to talk to mom while driving: go to jail?!?......

Dr. Randii Wessen, a program system engineer at NASA, holds a globe of mars where at the top in the northern hemisphere, a yellow square marks the landing area of the Phoenix Lander where ice water was found. | Photo by Tom Andrews/LAist This just in from the Mars Phoenix Lander's Twitter at 5:15 p.m.: "Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best......

There's a lot of confusion out there about Los Angeles City Council President, Eric Garcetti, these days. He's a superdelegate for Barack Obama (which leads to people throwing out the "cabinet position" question), it's often brought up that he has congressional aspirations, there's a viral website to elect Garcetti for D.A. of Gotham City (ah, yes, the new Batman movie), Mayor Tommy Carcetti is a character in HBO's The Wire (you can buy reelection t-shirts)......

The media has been reporting various small quakes over the last week. But is that really something to worry about? "It’s not uncommon for Orange County to experience several microquakes every week," Sciencedude Gary Robbins said at the OC Register in a brief about the three recent microquakes in Orange County. His statement goes for all of Southern California -- small quakes happen all the time. A daily viewing of the USGS' recent earthquake map......

Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, is joined by former Democratic presidential hopeful, John Edwards, at a rally today in Grand Rapids, Mich. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) Last week a fun meme went through the Twitterverse... "When Obama wins..." Well today as news broke that former presidential candidate and former senator John Edwards would endorse Barack Obama -- after months of speculation as to whether he would endorse at all -- Twitter crashed. Related?......

The Westside Extension effort, commonly dubbed as the "Subway to the Sea," went social networking/Web 2.0 style a few weeks ago with a group on Facebook. This is the first time a specific project has done outreach like this and word on the transit street is that more project managers may be doing more of this in the future. Metro's Librarian, Matthew Barrett, has definitely been a leader in exploring blogging and other online tools......

The geniuses at Common Craft created this video explaining Twitter in plain English. We only wish that governments would hire them to explain how parking ticket revenues worked and how to best follow a city council motion from creation to approved city ordinance. LAist tweets too, you can follow us here. Related -- What is RSS? Common Craft explains RSS on RSS Day -- Using Twitter in Car Culture -- Los Angeles, What Are......

You just finished filling up your tank at the gas station, but the next thing you do is not grab your keys to leave, it's to take an extra twenty seconds to note some statistics by inputting into Twitter the miles since your last fill up, the price per gallon and how many gallons you put in. Welcome to FuelFrog, a new application designed by three guys who embarked on a mission of launching a......

One hour ago, Eric Richardson of blogdowntown used Twitter, a microblogging text based social network, to tell his readers a fact about streetcar construction while on the streets of Portland. "Portland streetcar track construction went at one block per week, with construction only taking one lane and not the sidewalk," he said while on a Los Angeles delegation to the Pacific Northwest to study the public transit mode. Earlier, he tweeted from the airport, then......

Photo Megan Geckler's art by susan catherine via LAist Featured Photos This is a purposefully backdated post for a National Arts Marketing Project (NAMP) workshop called "The New Frontier Part Two: Blogging, Social Networking and YouTube!" organized by the LA Stage Alliance with guest speakers D. Jean Hester and LAist Editor, Zach Behrens. The following are notes and reference links for workshop participants. BLOGS - Video: Blogs in Plain English - General Blogs: boingboing,......

Using the latest and greatest Internet tools, the Los Angeles Fire Department is setting an example for public communication and ubiquity in the information age. After being notified via text message of a "traffic collision with entrapment on Sherman Way," we paid a call to LAFD for an update on their ever-expanding Web endeavors. We caught up with veteran LAFD firefighter and public service officer Brian Humphrey during one of his 24-hour shifts in......

Love it or hate it, Twitter does not appear to be just a passing fad as some suggest. You may find such nano-blogging tools to be annoying vehicles for unsolicited TMI, overly mundane ramblings, or instances reminiscent of grade-school crushes and "cyber-stalking." But how you view / receive / ignore your tweets is left up to you. You'd be surprised how much you can say in 140 words. But once you start receiving Twitter......

• The legal dispute between media giant Viacom and Google owned YouTube just gets more unpleasant. • Is Viacom engaging in a bit of hypocrisy when it comes to enforcing copyright on its programming? Maybe so. Take a look. • Did Viacom overstep its bounds a little when issuing those takedown notices for videos over at YouTube? Some people think so and are suing. • In other more pleasant Google news, one of its......

Starting today, South by Southwest is transitioning over from the Internet and Film festivals to the Music festival, but before we dive in to the 1,500 bands that will begin rocking Austin, we still have a lot of Interactive interviews to share with you. The Internet darlings of this year's SXSWi is Twitter, a social networking service where you tell your friends what you're doing through SMS, provided by Obvious Corp., San Francisco start-up......

Although it feels like it's been around forever, blogging is so new that even its Godfather is young. Ev Williams was the co-founder of Pyra Labs, which created Blogger.com in 1999, which he sold to Google four years later. After working for The Man for a year, Ev quit Google and formed Odeo, a podcast service. Like most promising start-ups helmed by successful entrepreneurs, Odeo attracted some investement money and formed a Board of......