Your optimistic San Francisco Chronicle has decided that the best way for you to imagine how many murders take place in Oakland each year (and where) is to plot them out on a Google map mashup. Each marker, once clicked, shows the victim's name, date they were killed, age and cause. On some, there are links to the corresponding news story. We're not sure about you, but we think this is a morbid mix of......

LA-based comedy troupe The Vacationeers fears Google Maps Street View Big Brother-ness. And ever since we saw a shot of our bedroom window on it, featuring our awful interior decor, so do we. [Source: Valleywag]......

The Pope, Linda Blair, and the Vatican’s "exorcist-in-chief." [BeyondChron] SF park improvement ballot measure benefits few. [Curbed]Macworld Keynote 2008 predictions form contest. Very nice. [Laughing Squid] The Chicken McNoggin and other vile food products. [SFoodie] Google Maps will display live Iowa caucus results. [ValleyWag] Swish says see ya. [SFGate] New science-fiction blog! [io9] And finally, Obama and Huckabee pull off surprising wins in Iowa caucuses. [Salon] Image: BeyondChron......

Ritual Coffee Roasters' two locations are only about three miles apart. Not so bad on a bike, right? Well, what if you're biking with 130 pounds of coffee? Yeah, a little tougher. This Saturday, popular cafe Ritual Roasters, in conjunction with Bikes to Rwanda, is having a wacky, multi-tiered charity event that involves bike-race betting, film-watching, a raffle, and the consumption of both of our favorite beverages: booze and coffee....

The Chronicle called Ed Jew's office today, and his legislative aide Barbara Meskunas said he wasn't in because he was sleeping. Jet lag, you know. According to the Chron, Tapioca Ed, did, however, have the time to pen an essay for the Sunset Beacon (which has not yet put Jew's essay online, but you can read last month's), in which he says he wants to "clear the air" about the allegations. In the essay, he......

To: commenter Hank Essay From: your friendly local blog SFist! Re: commotion at New Montgomery and Mission earlier today We saw your question in the Opera post about some commotion going down at New Montgomery and Mission this morning, and have the following information to pass along. --They arrested a shooter in SoMa this morning. (NOT related to the Loft 11 shooting, as we'd originally posted -- sorry!). We also found some more news about......

Have you checked out the latest hack to Google Maps? Somehow they've added street views, which lets you take a look at an intersection (say, 16th and Mission) from a street-level camera. You can get a street view of almost any intersection in the city, which is kinda freaky. ...

We got two interesting web sites/Google Maps to let everyone know about. ...

Okay, we got a tip about this a while ago in our inbox, and while it's totally f**king awesome, were remiss in posting on it. As some of you may know, Google has actually been pretty open about letting people play around with their new Google Maps. First off, Paul Rademacher created a tool for browsing Craigslist housing listings via Google Maps -- you can even sort by price-range! So hott! But Michael Doeff......