I speak with Phil Alvin of The Blasters, a roots-rock icon turned mathematician/AI researcher, for the Santa Cruz Weekly:

There are certain stereotypes associated with folks who turn out muscular, blues-inflected roots rock as the Blasters do. These stereotypes converge around the vision of the roadhouse, where boozy weekend warriors escape to play sturdy late-model rock & roll like their lives depended on it. Blasters frontman Phil Alvin defies such stereotypes, having maintained a notable musical career while also working in mathematical semantics—two fascinations that have often proven difficult to reconcile.

Read the rest at the Santa Cruz Weekly

A new article for Shareable about transmedia fiction, a trend towards social media becoming its own publishing medium, or even a literary form itself. I interview Laird Harrison about his Children of a Future Age project, a hybrid of a traditional novel and a blog, and Jesus Angel Garcia about his modern noir badbadbad, a novel that is being teased across various social media.

Read the rest on Shareable

For the AV Club Chicago, I interview singer-songwriter David Singer about his new album Arrows, scoring the Tony-award-winning play August: Osage County, recording psych-rock for an emo label, and the end of the Intonation Music Festival:

They are lifestyle-marketing events. I’ve had very few musical epiphanies at events like that—20,000 teenagers standing on a baseball diamond is not the ideal way to consume music, and I don’t want to spend six months of my life making that happen.

Read the rest at the AV Club.

Catching up on some recent writing: for Shareable, I wrapped up my series on socially-curated news by taking a look at the conservatives-gaming-Digg controversy and what happens when social news services fail. I also blogged about citizen scientists discovering a new pulsar and the distributed computer services that allow amateurs to contribute to scientific research efforts in their free time.

And for the SF Weekly, a bunch of new blurbs on writers Taylor Plimpton and Angela S. Choi, comedy by Alex Koll and The Denial Show, and the Gallery Hijinks Inaugural Exhibition.

A quick roundup of writing for the SF Weekly and Shareable.net, where I blog about social media, green tech, government 2.0, and guerrilla community building.

I’ve been previewing a lot of literary and arts events for the SF Weekly, including authors David Mitchell and Tony O’Neill, and street artist David Choe. Over at Shareable, I’m working on a series of posts about social news sites, and have posts up about the iPad app Flipboard and Google Reader’s new social features. I’ve also written recently about the intersections between crypto-forestry and guerrilla gardening.

New post for Shareable: Demanding Ethical Gadgets

Many of us share a creeping sense that our gadgets fund atrocities and injustices on the other side of the world. We read about suicides at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, or about the conflict minerals in our devices that have funded genocide in the Congo, register a brief sense of disgust, and move on. Every major technology company uses the same supply chain, sourcing conflict materials that are hewn into hot gadgets by people working in conditions that would be familiar to Upton Sinclair. The market solution would be to vote with our dollars, but that’s difficult when there isn’t really a choice.

Read the rest here

There’s a pretty fascinating thread about Facebook and the difference between how geeks vs. regular users experience it over on my Buzz feed. If such topics interest you, you should check it out.

A couple new previews for the SF Weekly: a reading by novelist T Cooper and the art opening for So Many Products, So Little Time: The Junk Mail Show.

A review of Clay Shirky’s fascinating new book Cognitive Surplus for Shareable:

Upon the release of his divisive 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky was besieged by media professionals: “what will happen to our careers in the brave new world of amateur media?” they asked. As a struggling freelance writer, I empathize. But as Shirky argues in his latest book Cognitive Surplus, that’s not the crucial question before us. In fact, the problem he poses is so critical, it’s counterproductive to approach this book from a defensive point of view. Shirky is concerned with a much more fundamental societal challenge: will we harness the publishing, sharing and collaboration innovations the internet offers to enrich the commons, or settle for Facebook updates and lolcats?

Read the entire review here

A preview of novelist/Rumpus contributor Joshua Mohr’s Termite Parade book release party for the SF Weekly:

A fresh take on the Bukowskian milieu of dirtbags, drunks, and drifters is rare, but Joshua Mohr accomplished it with his debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me. More improbably, O, The Oprah Magazine named it one of the best books of the year. Credit Mohr’s voice for bridging these two seemingly irreconcilable extremes.