Photo by Simon Shek via Flickr After yesterday's earthquake, Metro did something unusual for them. They informed the public in real time what was going on with the rail system. Metro's Twitter account, usually used for stating facts and promoting their services, was quickly put to work. "Bus and Rail Operations report no effects from the earthquake on Metro services. But trains operating at restricted speeds," they tweeted. Later on, an update: "After earthquake......

Google Trends provides insights into broad search patterns by users on Google. A look into what is being searched nationally this afternoon is obviously the earthquake. Today's 5.4 magnitude quake was only considered "moderate," which is big enough to knock things off shelves and cause minor damage to buildings. However, Google searches across the country are intensely focused on the incident. The majority of top 100 trends ("hot trends") are quake-related. U.S. Google Trends......

Screenshot by K. Moriarty via Flickr Whether it was the shaking or a surge of readers checking the LA Times' website, it was shut down temporarily after the 5.4, 11:42 a.m. earthquake in Chino Hills.......

www.strike.tv Teaser from StrikeTV on Vimeo. During the Writers Strike, a group of creatives got together to make Strike.TV and began to develop 40 projects that are expected to debut starting today (as of this writing on the morning of July 4th, only the above teaser has been launched). One of their promises is "to demonstrate that it was possible for Hollywood professionals to coexist and flourish with the studio system that has supported......

In another round of job cuts for the LA Times, the paper announced today the planned sacking of 250 jobs across the company which includes 150 editorial ones. The paper will also reduce the number pages it prints by 15%. This is due to a declining revenue, some which is blamed on the internet (which is also a blessing, depending on how you look at it). "You all know the paradox we find ourselves in,"......

Photo by JOHNNIE W@LKER via Flickr The FBI is reportedly looking into a Santa Monica based internet company that crashed a San Francisco based internet television's network last weekend. MediaDefender, who is hired to prevent "alleged copyright infringement using peer-to-peer distribution" (think old-school Napster) performed a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on Revision3. “Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes – quite without our approval. When we closed off their......

Carlos Mencia is back at it and chances are you're either pumped or pissed about it. The loved/hated comedian's show, Mind of Mencia is back for a fourth season, his new Comedy Central special "Performance Enhanced" is now in heavy rotation on the cable network and he's hitting the road with the Bud Light Presents: Carlos Mencia at Close Range Tour, which hits the Gibson Ampitheater September 26 and 27. The comic who was......

How many Internet memes can you spot/name in this video? Weezer's self-titled "Red Album," produced by Rick Rubin, is out June 3rd. via Weezer's official YouTube channel.......

Photo by nailmaker via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr 22-year-old Alan Hamai from Redondo Beach had just been awarded his degree in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and was celebrating when he fell to his death from the third floor of a dorm building. Hamai is the second student from SoCal to die at UCB this month; two weeks ago Christopher Wootton was fatally stabbed after a party on campus. The folks at......

Photo by akeg via Flick As powerful as the written word can be, sometimes it takes the extra help of a video and a little push by the "fourth estate" to get things done in Southern California. In today's weekly Road Sage column by Steve Hymon, he features Rich Allen who made a nearly 10-minute video to post on YouTube that highlighted the terrible pothole conditions on the 60 Freeway (video embedded below). Then......

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......

This guy's happy about something, maybe it's the Webbys | Photo by soundfromwayout via Flickr Webby Award Winners (basically the online Oscars) were announced today. A handful of locally based sites were nominated last month, but only a few made the grade. Congrats to all! Here are the winners: The Huffington Post walked away with both The People's Voice and official Webby Award. The Los Angeles Film School won the Webby Award for Best......

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......

There are thousands of people that read this blog via their subscription to LAist's RSS (Really Simple Syndication). But sometimes when people hear the word "RSS," their faces go blank. RSS is a pretty sweet tool to know how to use. Basically, instead of visiting a handful of your favorites sites everyday to see what's new, you visit one site, your RSS Reader, and all your favorite sites are loaded into one clean space. It......

A job listing popped on Craigslist yesterday that might be music to the right web and graphics dork's ears. It seems Nine Inch Nails is on the prowl for "an internet-savvy web and graphics assistant who will work with an art director on a wide variety of tasks relating to web development, graphic design, video editing/production, and online marketing." The basic blabbity-blah-blah expected know-hows follows (CSS, HTML, Flash, Javascript, et. al) along with design chops......

This week's Senate Committee Hearing on the Future of the Internet featured notable speakers on both sides of the net neutrality debate including Stanford Prof. Lawrence Lessig, FCC Commissioner Kevin J. Martin, Patric Verrone, President of the WGA-West, and Michele Combs of the Christian Coalition. And Justine Bateman, aka Jason's sister, aka Mallory Keaton. What is Ms. Bateman's interest and/or expertise in the Net Neutrality debate? "I have acted in many projects, from TV’s 'Family......

Those of you who rarely use your cell phones while driving need not take too much notice of the following announcement (oh, and p.s.? Thanks for being better than other people). For those of you, however, who insist on multi-tasking throughout your driving experience, watch out: that phone call you're making while wending your way down the 101 might just get you pulled over and fined, fined, fined. The CHP just released a press......

Photo by Peggy Archer via Flickr On Friday, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) launched their new website, which is a vast improvement to what they had before. And while the site is repackaged with a much nicer visual design and an easier to find live traffic conditions page (super useful, check it out), it's still missing two important components that should be built in the near future: A guide/FAQ to parking questions.......

Our photo storage/sharing network of choice, Flickr, is finally offering a video component. In other words, Flickr will store, stream, and enable the embedding of any kind of content that can be produced by a basic digital camera (now that most shoot moving as well as still pictures). A Flickr Pro account is required to upload video, which at $25/year was already necessary to upload more than 100mb of photos each month. Also, at......

Photo by Zach Behrens/LAist Soul Vegetarian opened up last summer in the nightclub space, but quickly closed a couple months ago. Not to fear, however, Jewel, who owns the building, continued the short lived soul food vegan restaurant near the corner of Pico and Crenshaw. "I've been a vegan for twenty-some years," she said, "and it was a dream of mine to open up a vegan restaurant." Soul Vegetarian (not to be confused with......

From everyone at LAist and in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, congrats! | Photo by discarted via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr While the Pulitzer Prize announcements yesterday gave nothing to the LA Times and as the LA Weekly noted, this year marked the first time since 2006 that the Weekly didn't win a Pulitzer, effectively ending their current streak (at one), the Webby Awards were announced today and with locals nominated. Epic-Fu --......

You may have seen this ad-mural go up at Melrose & Fairfax. It's part of clothing company 55DSL's viral-ad-whatever-the-fuck-it-is campaign to get people applying for a new job opportunity. The job: travel around the world in 55DSL clothes, or, as they say, "roam the earth and find all that is good and pure and kick ass." The application: a video application 1:55 seconds long. But if you plan on staying on planet Los Angeles......

We caught up with Mahalo Daily host/producer Veronica Belmont at Community Next over the weekend to discuss her daily (weekdays) video podcast for Santa Monica-based Mahalo. Veronica discussed her sci-fi affliction, World of Warcraft habit, and LA vs. SF. We also coined the term "puppy roll," a unique variation on the Rick roll featuring the Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis' bulldogs. What will Veronica get up to next?......

Calling all entrepreneurs, tech startups, and developers -- are you ready to pitch? Venture capitalists, industry execs and investors -- want to swim along with the sharks? Tonight, Dealmaker Media hosts its premiere Dealmaker LA event and it's not going to be just another cocktail party, according to Dealmaker CEO Debbie Landa. Dealmaker has been active in the Bay Area since 2000, bringing together start-up entrepreneurs with VC's and major executives with impressive results.......

Photo by discarted via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr After the Daily News' story on the Culver City based RateMyCop.com, the LA Times comes out with an editorial opinion on the site when talking about the hypocrisies of police accountability. "Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton tends to honor it in the breach -- he proclaims the department accountable, then decries those who scrutinize its work," the opinion with no author reads. "Critics......

Photo by discarted via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr Today, the Daily News looks into one of the internet's latest fascinations -- RateMyCop.com, a site, which happens to be based locally in Culver City, that gives people the opportunity to review an officer they've had an interaction with. Of course, concerns over officer safety and privacy are at the top of the opponents' lists to the site. "Law enforcement should never be trivialized, and......

So what DOES Rick Astley think of his accidental role as star of the viral Internet prank that keeps on never giving up? Despite rumors of a possible Super Bowl halftime appearance and the pining of journalists and geeks around the world, the Rick behind the Rickroll has remained mum. Or perhaps nobody bothered to call his management. But in a breakout week for the Rickroll that included a nod from the Gray Lady, David......

Students these days are so lazy...Instead of taking it to the streets like their parents' generation and brandishing signs and making noise they're opting to stay inside, chained to their computers. Except sometimes they discover that the medium is what makes the message, and in the SGV right now students who want the Gold Line extended to Montclair have found that their campaign is positively viral. Students have created a website called I Will Ride......

Today, the Wall Street Journal's blog, Buzzwatch, pointed readers over to a local graphic designer named Bobby S., who runs a blog called Kitsune Noir. "Ummm… I’m In The Wall Street Journal," he wrote earlier today. "File this post under un-fucking-believable." Earlier this month, Bobby started The Desktop Wallpaper Project, a weekly release of one free downloadable desktop wallpaper every Wednesday morning. Every week features a guest artist and each wallpaper is available in multiple......

One commenter on Digg asked "Was that jesus?" | Filmed by Zach Behrens/LAist At last Saturday's Anonymous protest in Hollywood, LAist took this above video. Before we could even got a chance to post it on LAist late Saturday afternoon, it had already been found on YouTube and dugg on Digg.com, garnering over 12,000 diggs under an appropriately written headline, "This is how police SHOULD react to protesters." It has not even been 48......