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......

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 logged into my email this morning to find five Facebook Wall posts from old friends -- many of whom I haven't spoken to in a while. "Hm, what is this spontaneous outpouring of love? How is it that so many have been moved to reach out to me this morning?" I clicked on over to my Facebook account, only to find -- I'D BEEN SPAMMED!!! Actually, I was the spammer, and every single......

The general consensus about last night's one-hour Golden Globes "Awards Show" (quotation marks make for great sarcasm indicators, yes?): Less than stellar. The snorefest reading-of-the-nominees and "the winner is" naming was about as thrilling as the reading of a will, with Time's Richard Corliss declaring in his post-mortem that the reporters delivering the news "all sank into a sea of blandness and blondness." Local Latino politicians are endorsing Barack Obama in his Democratic Presidental......

The law has always struggled to keep up with the fast-paced, ever-changing world of the internet. A federal investigation of fraud involving MySpace could set important legal precedents. The case brings up issues of first ammendment rights versus prosecution of harassment and other cybercrimes, as well as the question of jurisdiction in cyberspace. According to the Los Angeles Times, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles has issued subpoenas to MySpace and related parties in......

A different kind of web-server: Los Angeles based social networking site MySpace is getting served with subpoenas in the case of the teenager who committed suicide following a friend fake-out that was allegedly helmed by a classmate's parent. All I wanna do is BANG BANG BANG BANG! and take your...Fritos? Two Lancaster gang members have been convicted for killing a kid over his junk food. Laquane Keith and Reno Williams shot and killed 18-year-old LeMarcus......

So we heard that at 12:00 a.m. EST, 9:00 p.m. PST (or LA time for those of us who could give a crap about the rest of the West Coast) tonight, those sexy boys at Current TV, Max Lugavere and Jason Silva, will be hosting the exclusive (yes, exclusive) US broadcast of Radiohead playing In Rainbows. In its entirety. Sexy, exclusive, entirety. After the broadcast, M and J will be hosting a very special Best......

The Whole 9 is hosting their holiday party tomorrow (Tuesday) night from 6-9:30PM and would like to invite you to come! What started as an online community where creative, entrepreneurial open-minded people can meet and share, showcase their work and get work has turned into a creative space and art gallery in Culver City. The gallery has shows where the artists are selected from portfolios on The Whole 9 website. The host of the most......

Cardinal Roger Mahoney revealed that he had been assaulted in July outside of Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral; the attacker was "enraged by the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandal within days of a record settlement with hundreds of victims." Karl Dorrell will not be coaching UCLA in its upcoming Las Vegas Bowl game. Defensive coordinator DeWayne Walker will coach in the interim. If the world weren't already all shook up by Jakob Lodwick's departure......

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......

There is nothing like combining fashion and philanthropy. Tomorrow night, the Los Angeles flagship store for Martin & Osa is have a launch party for the opening of their store in Century City. The stylish fashion company has generously donated $5,000 to Step Up Women's Network and the event will feature shopping (optional), cocktails and bites, and time to mingle with friends and to meet new people. While Step Up Women's Network is for......

As California transplants, my family home up north has been a revolving door for visitors ever since we arrived in the Bay Area. While the constant influx of visitors can sometimes get a little tiring, it has had its benefits, primarily that my family has gotten to know NorCal's tourist destinations pretty well, particularly the Napa Valley and Sonoma County. For some reason I always seemed to miss out on wine tasting excursions when......

While SFist cringed at the fatal dose of crime littering the Bay Area, it found solace in Hillary Clinton's San Francisco campaign headquarters opening, which featured loads of exposed mammary glands. In other news, SF Taxi Commission ruled that Satan's cab must keep its (in)famous medallion number, 666; and in an un-fashion-forward frenzy, San Francisco Fashion Week (chortle) bars bloggers from covering and getting smashed at their shows and parties, respectively. Also, they found a......

Here's some tech news that made the cut this week: • Professional social networking site Linkedin has seen its traffic spike over three hundred percent in the last year. I wondered why I started getting all those Linkedin invites recently. • Speaking of social networking, watch out for the Facebook backlash. And, in a related story, what's a site like Facebook worth anyway? • Intel has joined the $100 group (aka one laptop per......

The inaugural EconSM conference, produced by Rafat Ali's ContentNext Media Network (parent of the excellent PaidContent site) is rockin' the Beverly Hilton with entertainment and new media heavies. EconSM addresses the present and potential economy of the social media marketplace in regards to online news, Hollywood, music, mobile media, and more. The amusing "Social Media Meets Hollywood" panel, in which Carson Daly sat alongside The L Word executive producer Ilene Chaiken, preceded lunch. Daly......

Remaining a hermit is going to be a lot harder as Mozilla has announced that it will be creating a social networking feature inside browsers such as Firefox. The Coop product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar. Those friends can share content and web pages with you (receive content from you, and send content to you). Adding a friend will mean getting access......

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......

Mashable Labs shocked the world yesterday when they published their data of 41,000 random YouTube users and determined that the average member is 27 years old, watches 39 videos over an hour and 18 minutes a day. Basically Heath Ledger. From a sample of 41,000 active user profiles we collected some rather unsurprising statistics. Based on the profile info supplied, the age of an average YouTuber is 27, with 20% being 35 or older......

Last summer Fox's Rupert Murdoch bought LA Internet start-up MySpace for $600 million; now, almost a year later, Fox execs are speculating that the social networking phenomenom is worth about five times that, according to the British site The Observer, which wrote two stories today about the media giant. MySpace is one of those online places where young people hang out - though 'swarm' might be a more accurate term for the kind of......

So now that Martha Stuart is a free woman – free to garden, free to get into fights with the Donald, free to terrorize us with her threats of global domination one marzipan cookie at a time – she has decided to launch – get ready for it – an online social network similar to MySpace. The site will be targeted towards adult women. Doing a little research LAist found there is actually already......

Since LAist mentioned Drew Lachey’s dance move earlier this week, we thought we’d give equal time to Drew’s older brother -- and the former Mr. Jessica Simpson – Nick, who’s helping launch a safer social networking website for kids. According to a Chicago Tribune story yesterday: Actor/singer Nick Lachey was eating lunch at a Los Angeles restaurant when he heard some disturbing news. Parry Aftab, a cyber safety advocate, approached Lachey and told him......

Some of the world's smartest, most creative and interesting people are getting together today up in Monterey for the TED conference. The 3-day, $4000+ coffee klatch is invite only (we're sure ours got lost in our spam folder). At that price you'd think it might be a hard sell, but lots of people think it's worth it: the first 500 seats for the 2007 conference are already gone. What makes TED so great? This......

In an environment so focused on creation of media content, there are also those who take a step back to critically evaluate it. Nor do we mean straight-up critics, but rather thinkers whose fields of knowledge are honed in the halls of the academy and other types of research institutions. Aram Sinnreich is a media analyst and Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. While not blogging his qualifying exams prep,......