The west coast leg of the Web 2.0 Expo is here! Yay! Wait, just what is this Internet-y web 2.0 exposition, exactly? Aside from the open-bar fetes presumably laced with cocaine and boobs, that is. According to their site, Web 2.0 Expo is: Co-produced by TechWeb and O'Reilly Media, [Web 2.0] is a conference and tradeshow for the rapidly growing ranks of designers and developers, product managers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketers, and business strategists who......

It's never a good sign when the most interesting thing about a viral video is how they spent their money. "Possum Death Spree 2" isn't so much a sequel to the first as a do-over with a slightly brighter color palette: scientist warns of melting permafrost, killer possums unleashed, lots of blood, some tame T&A, the end. Oh, and also, the production is carbon-neutral, which means that one startup bribed another startup so they could......

Banner week for SFist as the site's new editor introduced himself -- hooray for Brock! While the NY Times weighed in on SF's mayoral race, only SFist had the (insert tongue firmly into cheek) hard-hitting latest on candidate/activist Josh Wolf. Coverage of a protest vs. gentrification spawned a fantastic debate amongst SFist's readers. Finally, from the sublime to the ridiculous: video of a man that confused a Board of Supes meeting with "open mic......

Drinking and shopping? Sounds harmless! Or does it....? Find out for yourself at GenArt's first SF spring shopping event. Over 40 local vendors are offering discounted wares for the ladies and the fellows, with a fashion show, bevvys and music. 6-10pm, $10 for non-members. ShopSF at the Galleria, San Francisco Design Center, 101 Henry Adams St., SF. Fe in the Desert, a new play by Jessica Hagedorn about a woman struggling to make sense......

It's mostly this guy's fault. Jackson West, who was the first editor here at SFist, got the ball rolling with this post, "The City that Knows How." He helped to grow the site with his wit, feel for the city, and a small group of contributors. As we zero in on SFist's third anniversary, we thought it would be a great time to see what Jackson's been doing since he last graced these pages,......

Seeing beyond Sight What happens when you give visually impaired children cameras and ask them to capture their everyday life? Come find out at this exhibit for a new book by Tony Deifell, Seeing Beyond Sight: Photography by Blind Teenagers. Accompanying the revelatory photographs is commentary and reflections by the artists. If you can't make it tonight, the show runs until May 12 but stop by around 6 until 8pm to catch a glimpse of......

For a while, we could not write a post about modern music without quoting the influence of Igor Stravinsky. Eve, then our dear editor, even made fun of us. Tonight, we will be vindicated. Not to ruin the suspense, but today’s episode of Keeping Score, the SF Symphony award winning behind-the-scene program, will highlight Stravinsky as a revolutionary. If MTT says so, we can keep mentioning Igor every time we want, he must have been influential. ...

SFPD not surprised that a member was off doing kiddy sex junkets in Asia as they sort of knew it for years. -Caltrain board approves plan for Wi-FI on Caltrains. Thousands of commuters jump for joy. ...

In honor of Labor Day, we'd like to point out that every employee, freelancer and consultant in Silicon Valley has to bargain their health benefit terms on their own or take what the company offers, and many end up one of the 46 million Americans without. So this techie is rooting for Tom Ammiano to legislate health security, at least for San Franciscans. While individual entrepreneurial successes like the Mercury News' Matt "Silicon Beat" Marshall......

The big news yesterday, which hit our feed reader right before our wifi crapped out, was Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving down the 101 to Cupertino to join Apple's Board of Directors. Considering some of the trouble Apple's been in lately -- suppliers suing newspapers over reports of overworked employees in China, a less-than-stellar environmental record, stock option backdating scandals -- could this be a way for Google to outsource all the evil they're supposedly......

Locally, the big news was the second best blog party last Friday thrown by TechCrunch down in Menlo Park. Scott Beale was commissioned to take the photos, including the one above featuring an uneasy handshake between Valleywag's Nick Douglas (left) and his favorite whipping boy, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Nick had been bumped off the exclusive invite list, but Michel must have relented. If he had been dis-invited, apparently crashing the party was not an......

A new column devoted to the less-than-celebrated world of tech mixers, drinkups, LAN parties and other events for nerds and by nerds. Nothing says that computer junkies have to be anti-social! Monday: The penguin army descends on the Moscone Center for the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Come celebrate open source operating systems, gripe about hardware support issues, and make unflattering comments about the BSD kernel. Also, Web Monday, a regular event for web developers in......

We'd like to take a moment to break from our usual schedule of links to Gavin Newsom gossip, Web 2.0 snark and other Frisco-centric blog boosterism to highlight the plight of Survival Research Labs. Apparently a quarter-century of creating literally bleeding-edge art from the electro-mechanical detritus of the modern world isn't enough to keep the bulldozers at bay. That's right, having already been blacklisted by the San Francisco Fire Department from ever performing in......

Beth Spotswood pops ten questions for Gavin Newsom, and we want answers. Speaking of interviews, Shout Magazine raps with local MC Paris. And a crop of top local writers weigh in on the JT Leroy fracas, including Thomas Roche, Mark Pritchard and our own SFist Violet. Arnie will not be charged for driving his motorcycle without the proper M1 certification, eliciting derisive laughter from NorCal Politics and Rangelife. Sophie Maxwell finally makes a public......

This week in the Google and Apple News Korner SFist Tech Roundup: the same old familiar faces are giving money to each other and making life easier for you, the users of the internets. Google bought stock in AOL, after the latter turned down possible deals with Microsoft, and earlier Yahoo and Comcast. Google also made additions to its services by adding GMail access from mobile phones, and music search and purchasing options to......

Winona "Winnie" Tong comes to the Bay Area from the cool climes of beautiful Canada. Her profile reads like the history of personal computing which, frankly, it is (and, at least in the early years, mirrors our own experience -- except she started on an Apple and moved to WinTel, and we went vice-versa). Now, of course, it's Web 2.0, and instead of BBS systems and ICQ chat, she's got a blog, Creative Constipation.......

Niall Kennedy finds a San Jose couple who had a Web 2.0 wedding. Let's all wish them luck, because a Web 2.0 divorce could get ugly. If you're still looking for a man in San Jose, San Jose Inside's Single Gal suggests a trip to the Shark Tank. Beth Spotswood knows who she wants, but just misses The Gavster at Medjool. In local events, you had plenty to choose from. Mike Lin dropped by......

Ian over at WULAD must have smoked some Ombuds before deconstructing some political graffiti. Dinah Sanders explains her votes in the election -- before a new TV campaign from Herr Governator can get to her. In a mood to protest, but not to get off the couch? The UK brings us two technologies to let folks tele-protest via SMS. Ever had a domain hijacked? The guy who forged documents to steal sex.com from a......

Possibly one of our greatest disappointments in life was learning that real science wasn't like Weird Science. As it turns out, you can't just feed pictures into your computer and get a sex slave out of it. Some of these Web 2.0 guys should get on that. We just learned about "Ask a Scientist" - a monthly lecture series "for curious humans". That's us! We're curious! And, mostly, human. And could definitely increase our......

So, of course, we were busy yukking it up with funnyman Merlin Mann last night at the Web 1.0 confab. Silly us, making fun of the 'monetizing,' 'paradigm shifting,' 'game changing' intellects who took a bunch of great ideas from engineers and developers and turned them into marketing juggernauts, with or without a business plan. Let's just say that VRML, FrontPage, Flash, the <blink> tag, dual ISDN and other ante-dot-bomb technologies were rightly pilloried......

Well, Apple is rumored to be anouncing the iPod phone by Motorola at the Moscone Center on the 7th. 100 songs, service through Cingular are the rumored deets. In the meantime, the music business, not happy with the $350 million they've pocketed from the iTunes store since 2003, want a tiered pricing scheme, with new releases bumped to $1.49 -- which would be a great way to send people back to filesharing for the......

Oh, so much geekery, we're gonna do this bullet-style. Shall we get started? Jeb Bush dropped by EA's Tiburon studios and was treated to a simulation of himself in Madden 2006. Sadly, he's not in the real game, so you can't lay him or Dubya out with a virtual Ray Lewis.Kevin Smokler points us to CNET's list of the top ten dot-bombs. Thankfully, we didn't work for any of them, so you can't blame......

Tech updates from a busy week in the valley....