Here at DCist, we pride ourselves on providing D.C. area residents with one of the best ways to slack off while at work -- reading and commenting on our web site! But today's best procrastination method has to be this Google Search 2001 tool that Google released as part of its ongoing 10th birthday celebration. The search page lets you easily find out whether you are you cool/lame enough to be found on the Internet......

We wouldn't have believed it had the City Paper's Mike DeBonis not posted photographic evidence. The D.C. Council has apparently finally redesigned its hopelessly out of date, circa 1997 web site, complete with screaming hot blue and pink color scheme and blinking text headlines (pictured right). What has long been the laughing stock of the local government web world should soon actually look pretty good. No word yet on an official launch date, but we......

The hyper-local news and neighborhood information aggregation site EveryBlock launched its D.C. version this week. Enter your address, ZIP, or neighborhood into the search function and turn up everything from blog posts and photos by your neighbors, a map and description of recent nearby crime, real estate listings, relevant local news stories, and public calendar postings. Basically they've taken all the D.C. government's live data feeds and added in RSS for everything else local they......

Good news for all those who've lamented the unavailability of high quality, unrestricted digital content from D.C.'s most storied independent record label. Dischord Records' catalog has been available via the iTunes store and some other online sources for a few years now, but those recordings were most often only available at relatively low 128 kbps quality, and contained all the usual DRM restrictions. Not only that, in many of those stores a Dischord track cost......

Ever been frustrated trying to locate the local news stories on the Examiner web site? OK, maybe that's just us, since it's our job to read them. But if you had ever tried it, you would have discovered that you have to first go to the "News" section, and then make sure to select "Local News" in the drop down menu, as opposed to the tauntingly named "District of Columbia" section, which contained national politics......

Don't go storming in to Comcast's service center in Northeast to return your DVRs and modems just yet, but you may be able to free yourself from the cable provider's ubiquitous grip soon enough. The Examiner is reporting today that the D.C. Office of Cable Television and Verizon have reached an initial agreement to bring the provider's fiber optic network, FiOS, to the District. The agreement, while not yet a done deal, would mean that......

At the beginning of June, the Washington Times launched a fancy redesign of their web site to incorporate a lot of overdue Web 2.0 features, like 400,000 specialized news feeds by topic (neat) and a bunch of new video and audio features (sure, OK). They also moved their nearly nonexistent local coverage into the A section, which we hoped might mean a new emphasis on local news, but so far that hasn't been the case.......

Back in March we wrote about how the literary web site Hitotoki (pronounced hee toe toe key) was seeking submissions to launch a D.C. edition. Sadly it appears our post wasn't enough to give the site enough momentum. Greg Lavallee, who was handling the submissions for the D.C. site, wrote to DCist today:It is with a heavy heart that I deliver news of Hitotoki D.C.'s demise. Unfortunately, we were unable to gather enough quality submissions......

Let the bike vs. car wars continue! Toward the end of last week Matthew Yglesias linked to a new D.C. version of MyBikeLane.com, a site that allows users to upload photos capturing the license plate numbers of cars that park in city bike lanes. Yglesias promised to start uploading photos straightaway, and sure enough, a handful of photos at the top of the page are courtesy the Atlantic blogger, including the one above. The......

Intern season is in full swing in Washington, and one local blogger has taken notice of just how many gross older dudes are hoping to hook up with them. The concept behind m4intern is simple: posting entire Craigslist ads, with links, that are expressly designed to lure young women in D.C. interning for the summer out for dates and sex. It's not like you can't find these on your own, but when someone is taking......

Photo by brents pix The WWII Memorial just celebrated its fourth anniversary, and a little meme has popped up on several blogs over the last couple of days that paints a picture of almost universal loathing for its design. Arms and Influence kicked it off, condemning the monument for looking too much like a "Nazi memorial," then Matthew Yglesias picked it up, noting that it's difficult to illustrate what he sees as wrong with......

Photo by Jeffrey Lewis from ArmsControlWonk, snapped on the Red line this morning around 9:30 a.m. while traveling between the Woodley Park and Dupont Circle stations. Used by permission. National security and nuclear arms control blogger Jeffrey Lewis of ArmsControlWonk was on the Red line this morning when he noticed a rather odd new sign prohibiting certain behavior on Metro. Next to the usual diagrams picturing how you must not block, crowd around or......

DCist was pleased to learn today that we've been selected as the official blog to represent the District of Columbia at this year's Democratic National Convention in Denver. DCist will be part of the State Blogger Corps, which is a new cadre of bloggers who cover state and local politics that the Democratic National Committee has invited to sit with their own delegations on the convention floor. You can find a full list of......

Written by DCist contributor Wade Green Jr. Pull up a chair to the new OpenTable. The online real-time restaurant reservation site has added a new feature allowing diners to contribute their feedback on a restaurant just moments after dining — and even have their opinion provided to the restaurant, if they like. After honoring a reservation, patrons will receive a form email asking what they thought of the restaurant. Food, ambiance, service and the overall......

Michael Calderone over at the Politico broke the news today that D.C.'s original foul-mouthed political blog, Wonkette, is leaving the Gawker media empire. Managing editor Ken Layne will personally take the helm of the newly independent Wonkette, as he confirmed in a post on the site today. There's some pretty thinly veiled subtext in both the letter from Gawker publisher Nick Denton that Calderone posted, and in Layne's announcement, that Layne and Denton disagree about......

A user on the Washington, D.C. page of the USASexGuide's massage parlor online discussion forum was kind enough to link to a post of ours earlier this week, at which point we were alerted to the web site's existence. And boy oh boy, does it contain mounds of helpful/hilarious information about which Asian massage parlors in the District offer the best "full service" technicians. In other words, this is a chat room for men to......

The literary Web site Hitotoki (pronounced hee toe toe key) is looking to launch a D.C. edition, but the editorial staff is facing a small problem — they need content. What is Hitotoki, you ask? In Japanese, the word can mean a moment or a brief stretch of time. Online, it's a project — launched in May 2007 — that publishes stories tied to specific locations within a city. These stories range from an Italian......

Fans of live music in the District tend to have a real soft spot for the Velvet Lounge near 9th and U Streets NW. It's a tiny venue with a reputation for hosting experimental acts no one else will, and for employing one of the best sound engineers in town in Rob Curtis. But no one who tries to keep track of who is playing at the Velvet Lounge has ever had a single nice......

WUSA has the story of Newport News, Va.-based reporter Simon Owens, who has started a movement to make today, January 30, International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. The idea, which appears to have gained quite a bit of traction all over the internet, was born out of frustration with the amount of spam Owens has been receiving thanks to his account on the popular social networking site. MySpace, despite its impressively ugly design and clunky......

Sometime last week a friend of DCist sent in this rather hilarious web site promoting what appears to be a one-man crusade and protest against the Silver Spring, Md.-based Discovery Channel. As you can see, the singularly named "Lee," with his faux-tough mug shot and all-caps, is dishing out a little of the old insane rambling on the cable network to promote his "Save the Planet Protest Against the Discovery Channel," which the web site......

The District of Columbia Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA) has launched a redesigned web site today in the hopes that it will help D.C. residents better prepare for emergencies. The site, called 72hours.dc.gov, lists emergency resource information by topic, much like the previous Emergency Information Center web site, and offers four relatively simple steps the city hopes each of us will take now, before an actual emergency happens. The steps are 1) Get......

The year's almost over, so we're going over our annual checklists to make sure we've provided a full year's worth of internet. Still undone: reminding you about how great RSS is. For those unacquainted, the acronym stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it makes staying up to date with DCist and other sites much easier. You simply plug our feed URL into your favorite RSS application and it'll periodically check for new entries, saving you......

In the Internet age, far fewer people still regularly turn to a paper version of the yellow pages, but that doesn't mean several companies aren't still delivering phone books to homes and businesses in Washington every year. We spotted about 5-6 brand new Yellow Books on the sidewalk on 9th Street NW in Shaw (around the corner from DCist HQ) over the weekend, having been delivered to what are clearly boarded up and abandoned buildings......

Forget Christmas shopping, paying your bills, reading articulate reviews on your favorite local blog. The Internet is for porn. Such is one of the life lessons the delightful Avenue Q, now playing at the National Theater, provides. The now-famous show is a Sesame Street for the post-college, ennui-ridden 20 or 30-something. This means it teaches us not to spell and know our colors, but instead how to cope with useless liberal arts degrees, commitment-phobic boyfriends......

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Fake Accents is their ability to make their inherent contradictions seamlessly coexist. One might not expect that the same band who records and listens to their own practice sessions would also write a disclaimer on their first album that most of the songs that they'd written were actually just ripped off of other songs. Their songs are identifiable by both their catchy hooks and their noisy guitar riffs.......

Dynamic, lively, stunning, soaring. These are the words used by Smithsonian officials and architect Spencer de Grey to describe the new Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, home to both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. With a blend of modern aesthetics and historic sensibilities, the new courtyard is a gorgeous space that the Smithsonian plans to use to hold public......

It’s not like you go to the D.C. DMV to chat up the happy employees as it is. Now, reports the Examiner, when it comes to getting rid of parking tickets, you might not have the choice. The DMV is proposing moving all ticket adjudication services to postal mail or the Internet as a means of streamlining the process. The motivation? The number of tickets is expected to skyrocket next year as the city......

Thanks to Mike DeBonis over at City Desk, today we find that the District's official website has been revamped. The site -- dc.gov -- is now less cluttered, and as DeBonis notes, no longer boasts the smiling mug of the mayor in the upper left-hand corner. Unfortunately, the same online care has not extended to all branches of local government -- the official website for the D.C. Council still looks like something that was put......

Good morning, Washington. Make it to the polls yesterday? If so, we hope you did so before the sun went down — it got cold in a hurry last night, as the area rapidly moved from warmer-than-usual temps to colder-than-usual ones. CapitalWeather is saying that the weekend should be warmer, at least. Election 2007: The results are in, and it looks like it was a good night for Virginia's Democrats. The Dems picked up......

Through a pre-coffee haze this morning, we were a little confused by an AP story up on WTOP about how the Smithsonian is looking for someone to move in and take over its Arts and Industries Building. Why did it seem so ... familiar? Oh right. Because the Washington Post wrote the same story back in May. So why did the AP pick up on it today? Because the The Smithsonian Institution issued yet......