In celebration of their 500th MIX member, the folks over at JETSET will be video blogging LIVE tonight from JETSET’s Sekrit LA HQ. I’ll be there. So will the LA Weekly and apparently a ton of other folks as well. It’ll be vlogaliscious! You can watch it live between 6pm-7pm on live.jetsetshow.com.

Fuckin’ A, man.

It’s about time that Los Angeles’ 2nd greatest fictional character got his own religion. With all the un-dude like behavior going on these days it’s high time someone stepped up to help spread the message of Dudeism, and The Church of the Latter-Day Dude promises to do just that. As well as shine a flickering, bowling alley florescent tube light on some of the other great dudes in history. And um, if you are worried about this being another men-only faith, well, you know, don’t. Dudesits are not afraid of the word “Vagina.”

“Incidentally, the term “dude” is commonly agreed to refer to both genders. Most linguists contend that “Dudette” is not in keeping with the parlance of our times.”

[Thanks Merlin]

There was some sort of brushfire burning close enough to Dodger Stadium right now to put some serious smoke and haze on the field (I’m claiming it’s the reason the Dodgers were trailing the Braves 3-2 at the time.)

I headed over to KCAL’s website to see if there was some BREAKING NEWS@!!!1 but came up empty.

What I found, though, was something that I thought said a thing or two about the KCAL/KCBS audience.
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I’m still mentally processing everything that happened at Pixelodeon this weekend. I’ll probably spend more time on some of the more personal/technical/overall thoughts I walked away from it with on my own blog in the next few days but I wanted to follow up here by noting that it was one of the coolest events I’ve seen put on in LA, certainly one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to and the most interesting discussions I’ve ever heard inside the walls of AFI. Really everything about how this was put on was done right and the organizers deserve a huge round of congratulations for that. If you are at all interested in media or the web or creating video content of any kind or where all this is headed for that matter, and you didn’t swing by there this weekend you missed out in a major way. More thoughts after the jump.
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As you might have gathered from my recent posts, tweets, or photos, I’m going to be at Pixelodeon all weekend. A few more of us from blogging.la will be there as well and we’ll be posting about it like crazy – web connection permitting of course. And if it’s not I’ll be sending in tweets and photos at every given moment but most likely I’ll be posting here most of the day as things happen. Keep an eye on the site if you are interested, maybe just skip over my posts (or pretend you are just now starting to skip over my posts).

I just saw the news on Franklin Avenue that LAblogs.com is going to be closing it’s doors once and for all. This isn’t a huge surprise as it’s been a long time since new things happened there and the future has been up in the air for years. That said, I can’t report that news without feeling a little bummed – Jonah and lablogs.com were a huge inspiration to all of us with blogs relating to Los Angeles back in the very early days and as I’ve said before the lablogs.com blogroll was one of the things that gave Jason and I the idea to build blogging.la in the first place. He’s still working on Digesty and not going anywhere, but lablogs.com will always have a special place in my memory.

Super congrats to Eric Richardson today for the very cool step he’s taking with blogdowntown. The site, arguably the most comprehensive blog about downtown LA, has been a solo show since he launched it, but today Eric announced he’s brining in some more folks – Ed Fuentes and our own Dave Bullock will now be adding things to the mix there regularly. I expect awesome things from this change, and if you can you should swing by the blogdowntown picnic today and congratulate them in person!

I’ve been sitting on a story for a couple of days about how the news site Pasadena Now was planning on outsourcing two local reporting positions to India:

James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore for $7,200.
…
So, on the Indian version of Craigslist, he posted an ad that said in part, “We do not believe that geographic distance between California and India will present unsurmountable problems, and that working together with you will result in your development of a keen working knowledge of this city’s affairs.”

However, when I Googled it just now so I could finally write about, I discovered that KCAL reported this morning that the plan is on hold. They’ve been so busy dealing with media response to the story that they haven’t been able to train the correspondents. Sounds like they’re still planning on moving ahead once the storm settles, though.

If the blog-LA-sphere seems a bit less cranky today, it’s probably because Martini Republic is now kaput.

Publisher/architect Laura Fisher split last year for undisclosed reasons. Lead curmudgeon Joseph “Scribes” Mailander left last week in something of a huff and started his own blog.

And political anonyblogger Alex deLarge has apparently removed himself to Martini Revolution along with a couple MR writers …
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Image via Wikipedia

LA is a media town, and arguably the most-wired in the world – so even though events are taking place in Asia involving a company based in the Bay Area, this is pretty interesting news about a “local” network:

Our sister site, Metroblogging Bangkok, reports that Thailand is so ticked off about the recent posting of a video criticizing their beloved (and military-backed) monarch that they have filed suit against YouTube and Google …
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Take this with a grain block of salt, but according to Outside.in, downtown Los Angeles is the third bloggiest neighborhood in the U.S.

Yep. Downtown bloggers (of whom there are many) still don’t stack up to the bloggy hotbed of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn and second-place blogmasters in Shaw, DC.

Before the Silver Lake/Los Feliz/Echo Park blogmafia (or the Hollywoodians, Valleyites, South Bayers or any one else from the blog-LA-sphere) get their trackbacked knickers in a twist, it should be noted that outside.in is an opt-in registry for neighborhood blogs tied to the Google Maps API. Here’s their methodology for picking the top 10:
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I just noticed on our Job Boards that “Epitaph is looking for a webmaster to manage www.epitaph.com, www.anti.com and www.hell-cat.com.” Sound interesting? Hell I almost applied myself. Check out what they are looking for and see if it might be for you. And of course, if you are looking for a job, or need to hire someone don’t forget about our newly launched Job Boards.

A younger Seipp interviews Bill Blass (image via Matt Welch)

Cathy Seipp, columnist, journalist, blogger and provocateur extraordinaire, died at 2:05 this afternoon, friend Lewis Fein blogs. She had spent the better part of four years kicking cancer’s ass in much the same way she had done to countless politicos, journalists and the L.A. Times – with a great deal of wit, style, vigor and the occasional soupcon of humility.

In the end, though, the disease won, eventually robbing L.A. of one of its more original, acidic and just-plain-funny pundits at the too-damn-young age of 49. She leaves behind a legacy of pugnacious and intelligent work as well as her family and a wide host of friends, critics and fans.

Services will be held at 10 a.m. Friday at Mt. Sinai Hollywood Hills, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles. Instead of flowers, Seipp had requested that people make donations to the Humane Society, www.hsus.org.

In a telling bit of irony, the obit in the Times – the paper she needled with tremendous humor and accuracy in the 90′s in Buzz Magazine – is listed as one of the site’s three most popular stories right now.

Cathy Seipp’s fight against cancer, which she has courageously shared on her blog for many months, has apparently become a losing battle, according to this post by her daughter, Maia:

The doctor says that right now they’re just making her comfortable. She’s sedated, with painkillers among other things. Lungs collapsed so right now we just want to make sure she has dignity and is not in pain. The doctor says she has a couple days left.

Whether you snickered at her wicked “Margo Magee” dissections of the L.A. Times in the former Buzz magazine, or you raged at (or with) her conservative columns in The National Review, you could always be damned sure of one thing with Cathy: You were in the presence of an uncompromising and talented writer who put her heart and brain behind her work every step of the way.

Let’s hope the rest of her journey is as smooth as such things can be.