Mayor Gavin Newsom had the gall -- the gall! -- to defend his Hawaiian sojourn , saying "I was gone Friday and Saturday...and one of the most remarkable things that’s happened in the last century is the ability to communicate with people in real time and engage in a dialogue and discussion and coordination and collaboration, without necessarily being physically in the same room." And you know what? Good for you, Mayor man. No,......

Bipartisan legislators introduced a bill in the California Senate Wednesday that would grant every child born within the state a $500 savings account, earmarked for higher education, a home downpayment, or retirement. We appreciate the idea of teaching young 'uns how to save for the future, sure. And we appreciate that people are working to counteract California's poverty. But, come on . . . finance lessons from the folks that have put California in the red?...

Not content to take over earth, Google just announced a partnership with NASA to start taking over outer space too. The partnership will allow Google to show all sorts of cool things like 3-D maps of the moon and Mars and will allow for real time tracking of the international space station and the space shuttle. You will also be able to watch weather patterns and other things from outer space so hopefully it'll make it easier for the President to see major Hurricanes that are about to hit major cities. ...

As we mentioned earlier, our own SFist Jon is spending the day at our favorite sports blog, Deadspin, liveblogging this afternoon's Austria vs Croatia game. Join him as he recounts the game in real time, references a variety of pop culture touchpoints (so far we've seen Bono, NASCAR, and Bob's Big Boy come up, and the game's only been on for about 10 minutes), and (gasp!) refer to himself in the first person. Go Jon,......

All good San Francisco political junkies have Usual Suspects bookmarked on their browser. The local clearinghouse of all things political keeps everyone up to date, diligently reading and summarizing all the articles about anything even remotely related to local politics -- and not just the articles featuring Chris Daly doing something vaguely embarrassing, like some other websites we might mention. We sat down (virtually) with the seven folks behind the scenes and chatted 'em......

We'd like this post to be a celebration of the work done by David Sifry and all our friends at Technorati, who recorded their billionth link tracked today. In 2002, David "Wanted to know when somebody said something about me," and eventually helped develop one of our favorite tools for searching the web in real time. Technorati helped change the conception of the web as the "world's biggest library" into something dynamic and relevant.......