I sometimes do what people call “spring cleaning” at the end of a year, when I get a hankering to straighten up the place — to get rid of some of the clutter that inevitably creeps into our house over the months, clean, and make room for a fresh, clean new year and its possibilities.
It was in the middle of my current purging of no-longer-needed papers from file cabinets and taking no-longer-worn clothes to Goodwill that I stumbled across a project by the photographer Michael Wolf.
Wolf is a German photographer who …

I wrote about vog recently and the article is out in the current (August 2009) Honolulu magazine.
Here’s how it starts:
It comes on the Kona winds—the dreaded yellow-brown haze of vog that makes eyes burn and lungs protest. On the Big Island, of course, it has done far more damage. How bad could it get? And what do we really know about vog and its effects?
Three-thousand, eight-hundred people lived on Miyakejima, a small island off Tokyo, until one day in September 2000, when the Japanese government ordered the island evacuated because …

I’m sure Twitter can be used stupidly, and that’s where some people are stuck; they only know that reputation.
But it can also be used splendidly, and there isn’t really any way to understand that unless you get in there and see it for yourself.
Here is a word cloud of the people who “follow” me at Twitter. It’s made from the bios of people who are following me (I created it by inputting my Twitter name at TwitterSheep.com). ”Following me” means they receive my “tweets,” the 140-character or less messages that I …

Look where I landed! 

Online mogul Guy Kawasaki describes his alltop.com this way:
The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the …

Because I like multi-tasking, I will again be tweeting live from the Merrie Monarch tonight (Fri. April 17th) during the Kahiko competition.

Follow me at @LeslieLang, or follow #merrie.
Off I go to pick some orchids for my hair! We’re leaving for the Edith Kanaka‘ole Stadium soon.

 
One of my many hats has me, along with Kris Bordessa, operating the website Big Island On The Cheap, a place for all things free/cheap/discounted on the Big Island. And right now, in honor of Merrie Monarch week, we have some contests going on. All you have to do is follow the links to the contest posts, and then enter your name in comments there to possibly win one of our random drawings.
We are giving away a beautiful, and I do mean beautiful, hand blown glass vase from the Volcano glass studio 2400 …

An article in tomorrow’s New York Times is titled ‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers.
If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.
A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.

It’s very much like what has sprung up over at FBI blogs, to which I belong. (And when I …

I want to be clear that the person in the video is not me. I know somebody will miss that! It’s not. This is a post about someone else whose name is Leslie Lang.
The other day I wrote about a standup comic who lives in San Jose and has the same name as me, and then she saw the post and emailed me! 
And she sent me a link to her comedy act on YouTube, which is, indeed, funny. I enjoyed it.
I like her and we’ve been emailing back and forth and it’s WEIRD. …

It’s almost Merrie Monarch week here on the Big Island. I love this week, when Hilo town shimmers and comes alive with people and flowers and hula everywhere.
Over at Big Island On The Cheap, we are going to be hitting Merrie Monarch hard. We’ll have a bunch of features — where to eat, half- and full-day trips to take around Hilo, all the exciting things going on with Merrie Monarch itself, some great local coupon deals that are exclusive to our readers (whether residents or visitors),  and some other surprises, …

Does anybody have extra Merrie Monarch tickets I could buy from them (at cost)?
One year my friend was on a mission to get Merrie Monarch tickets and asked a stranger in line at Starbucks, and said stranger indeed had extra tickets.
I haven’t asked at Starbucks yet, but how about you, online world? Surely you’re more effective than hitting up strangers at Starbucks!
I’d throw in a signed copy of my Exploring Historic Hilo book, if it helped.
Please ask around, tell your friends, all that. Let me know! I would really appreciate any help.