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......

LA Times Book Prize Science & Technology Nominees As the LA Times Book Prize award ceremony looms ever-closer, we're taking a look at the books nominated in each category. As we mentioned last week, unlike other big literary awards, the LA Times Book Prize winners are never a sure thing, which is what makes following them all the more fun. The nominees in the Science & Technology category this year are:Animal Architects: Building and......

This is where Digg got its start | Use the Google map to zoom in and play! 17 million people get their news monthly via Digg.com, a powerhouse social news site where the readers vote, ahem, digg, on stories, eventually pushing the popular and important ones to the homepage. And in 2004, it all started here in Los Angeles in the Westside neighborhood of Mar Vista according to a CNN Money Business 2.0 report. Digg......

As reports and tweets comes out of of SXSW in Austin, TX where BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy reportedly held a disastrous interview with 23-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, news of the popular social networking site with more of a national and local business twist hit the wires: Paramount will offer movie clips via a Facebook application, a first for the movie industry....

I've got a conundrum, folks. You might, too: In a study entitled "The End of the Music Industry As We Know It" (suggested subhead: "And consumers feel fine"), Forrester Research, Inc., is reporting that half of music sales will be digital by 2011, and digital sales will surpass CDs entirely by 2012. It should be pretty clear to everyone that the CD is beginning to go the way of the VHS tape - even......

Lakers 111, Sonics 91 - Seattle had no chance against the surging Lake Show. Kobe was ejected in the third and it didn't matter (double technical after arguing a call -- not a huge deal). LA has won 11 of their last 13 and all but one was on the road. The Lakers got double digit contributions from seven players, led by Pau Gasol's 22. Ducks 6, Blackhawks 3 - This game was all about......

The AMGEN Tour of California has returned and it started a couple days ago with a time trial in Palo Alto. The tour makes its way to Sacramento today and then starts heading south towards Los Angeles. The race concludes on Sunday, February 24th with Stage 7 which starts in Santa Clarita and finishes in Pasadena. You can watch the Tour nightly on VERSUS at their 8:00pm slot. The professional commentators that bring you the......

With so many epic video game titles making their debut last year, 2008 has some pretty big shoes to fill. Several titles released in 2007 undoubtedly rank the highest among several industry top 10 lists; Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, and Mass Effect to name a few. These games have proven and will continue to prove that they will be quite difficult to surpass in quality. Such competition is exactly what makes the gaming......

The Daily News has more details on those marijuana vending machines. Besides, you know, the fact that they are TOTALLY AWESOME! A rash of gang violence in Watts since the weekend has led to two shooting deaths and the injury of at least 13 others. Yahoo is not doing so well: a major drop in fourth quarter profits is going to mean layoffs somewhere in the neighborhood of of 7% of the workforce. Four......

TALK Natalie Angier, New York Times reporter and author of Woman: An Intimate Geography, has written foreword to Full Body Project, the recently published book of photographs by Leonard Nimoy (yes Trekkies, Spock). The two will focus their Hammer Conversation on the concepts of beauty and sexuality. 7 pm // Hammer Museum // 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles // Free. MORE TALK As we read in Get Your Lit On, yesterday, Fritjof Capra talks with......

Can I just say that after giving up TV, I have had a bitch of a time trying to find Family Guy and Sex and the City episodes (which I have recently gotten re-addicted to over the Christmas holiday) online. I found a solution (and something else to get addicted to) – OVGuide.com. OVG is now on my Firefox toolbar – and that's a big deal to me, though maybe not you because you......

A group of enterprising young researchers in UCLA's graduate Computer Science department have discovered a fun new way of using your iPod playlist: Wi-Fi enabled software sends your music preferences to whatever computer is nearby. Then music tailored to your preferences pumps out of the speakers -- can you imagine walking into a coffee shop, and the Carrie Underwood track playing shuts off, and a Matthew Good album slides into the rotation instead? How......

We've all seen phishing e-mails before (thank you eBay, PayPal) but it's a bit trickier when the e-mail deliberately asking you to pony up your e-mail username and password comes from a sender purporting to be USCTEAM. The e-mail received today by several USC e-mail account holders suggests that the user's e-mail account will be terminated "permanently" within 7 days lest the recipient respond with account details including username, password, date of birth, and "country......

It sounds like the plot of a Charlton Heston film from the 70's, but the possibility of meat from cloned livestock has become a reality. The FDA just released an extensive risk assessment whose aim is "determining whether cloning poses any health risks to the animals involved in the cloning process, and whether any hazards arise during the development of clones or their progeny that may pose food consumption risks" (you can check out......

Photo by Jack Delano via Library of Congress on Flickr The above photo is of a co-op orange packing plant in Redlands, 60 miles East of Los Angeles. A workman is doing the preliminary sorting and picking out the discards. This is just one of the 3,000 images the Library of Congress uploaded to Flickr, Yahoo's photo sharing service, yesterday.In a pilot project announced Wednesday, the government archive put the public-domain, copyright-free photos on......

Twiistup is hosting its third event tonight at the Air Conditioned Supper Club on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice. What is Twiistup? It's the brainchild of Mike Macadaan who was seeking to fill a need for a fun, tech-focused event that would showcase up-and-coming companies, while providing a casual environment for discovery and networking. Geeks are cool. Southern California tech company startups are hot and Twiistup is the place to be to bring those elements......

LA is a gadget kind of town. We’re also, it seems, swiftly becoming quite the literary town. And so, as the year draws nigh and you scramble around the city trying to score the latest whatever for your loved ones this holiday season, it would be wrong of us to ignore Kindle. Amazon’s Kindle has been out for a month now. Many in the book world deemed it a failure from the outset. Many booklovers......

There are two things you can count on living in LA: fires and earthquakes. Now, it seems, we might need to add some tsunami insurance to our list of must-have SoCal coverage policies. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Seismic Safety Commission have launched a study to determine the potential tsunami risk to the LA and Long Beach ports. ...

For your lunch time viewing pleasure today is a lovely little diddy going around the Internet and tech circles about the new tech "bubble" that is upon us. It's to the tune of "We Didn't Start The Fire" by Billy Joel and if it's doesn't make you laugh, maybe it will give you a few ideas for new websites to check out. Many Angeleno's in the tech sector say the next surge of technology......

What's the holiday season without one of the most popular and famous works in Western choral literature -- George Frideric Handel's "Messiah"? And who doesn't like sing-alongs? (Remember our love for The Sound of Music Sing-A-Long at the Hollywood Bowl?) So many questions, so many... Los Angeles Master Chorale: Messiah Sing-Along Monday, December 10 & Sunday, December 16 @ 7:30 pm Walt Disney Concert Hall Angeles Chorale: George Frideric Handel Messiah December 15 @......

MUSIC: CalTech isn’t just about nerdy rocket scientists. They have glee clubs, too! All kidding aside, tonight's concert will feature traditional holiday favorites as well as the Women's Club taking on Porpora’s Magnificat, written in the 1730s. 8 pm // Dabney Lounge at California Institute of Technology // 1200 East California Blvd., Pasadena // Free. DANCE: From CalTech, we’ll head over to CalArts in Valencia. The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance is holding its......

StumbleUpon is one of several Web 2.0 properties experiencing a surge in activity that could be related to the WGA strike. Listen to the LAist interview with Dave Feller, VP of Marketing @ StumbleUpon: Evidently the lack of new programming on TV, particularly late night, is causing a surge of activity online, a measurable increase that page ranker/social networking site StumbleUpon. It makes one wonder what will happen if/when the WGA strike starts to affect......

We heart our sister -Ists: today, SFist Editor Bock Keeling was profiled in the SF Weekly. We find out that Gus Van Sant hates SFist and a funny picture of a woman modeling in front of an oil spill crew is now being featured on the site. Pro football player Sean Taylor has died from injuries sustained in a mysterious and tragic shooting incident; he was 24 years old. Police are still searching for......

Amazon's new revolutionary way to read books blows chunks. How do we know? Because we ignored this week's Newsweek cover story puff piece on the Kindle, and paid attention to the web. Type "kindle sucks" into Google and see what you get. It's not pretty. "The Kindle sucks goat ball sack", says one Twitterer named Dean. Cory from BoingBoing warns of the Awful crap that will soon doom the device and wonders why "Amazon,......

Read our exclusive LAist interview with G4TV's Olivia Munn to find out how she feels about playing Gay Chicken with Kevin Pereira, living in Los Angeles, and making out with her spray-tan lady...

Not about to throw his back out. With the holiday season coming up, many of us become nostalgic with the sights, smells, and sounds of relatives and good times past and present. Some of us turn to photographs to settle these hungry feelings, others slides, others old film reels. The main problem in this endeavor, though, comes when you try to actually find the photos you're thinking of. I know, in my house, we have......

3,000 homeless plus 400 volunteers makes for a festive mood at a Skid Row Thanksgiving Dinner today. More Downtown holiday news at blogdowntown. 1.85 million. That is how many people expected to be traveling in, out and through LAX this holiday weekend. That number is almost half of Los Angeles' population! NPR gives out 9 tips on how to have a more eco-friendly Thanksgiving. Tip #3, skip the Turkey and go for native protein......

For some reason we thought that this video got eaten by our technology, but look, there's Alicia Keys belting out "No One", her second and final song from the Writers Guild march and rally and mini-concert in Hollywood today. We also have video of her other song too. Do we love her? Yes. Do we have a few more bonus pics of her for your collective asses? Find out after the jump :)......

"This is not. . . targeting or profiling. It is an effort to understand communities." Police Chief William J. Bratton defending a LAPD counter-terrorism program that uses "U.S. census data and other demographic information to pinpoint various Muslim communities and then reach out to them through social service agencies." [LA Times] "Over my dead body." Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on any limit of his goals of expanding the LAPD. A fiscally conservative and wary City......

Artist: Herbie Hancock Album: River: The Joni Letters Label: Verve Records Release Date: 9/25/07 I haven't had a chance to review a release from a "living legend" until this album arrived in my PO box. Herbie Hancock seems like someone who has done it all: a jazz icon unafraid of technology, a winner of multiple Grammy awards and an Oscar, and a virtuoso live performer - but he's never been a lyricist, and had never......