1. Come up with your criteria: Under $2000? Has to allow cats? Laundry on premises? These are things you need to know. If you’re living with someone else (or moving in with them because you’re tired of leaving your cat all alone when you’re over at their house) talk to this person about his or her criteria. Since you’re in a healthy relationship, hopefully the lines of communication are already open.
2. Focus on a few neighborhoods: Chances are that there are going to be some places you can afford to live but won’t want to and some places you want to live but can’t afford. Best to get that out of the way before you get much deeper. Head on over to HousingMaps.com and visit San Francisco. You can pretty quickly scan and see what it costs to live in different neighborhoods. You might enter you criteria from step one to make the job easier.
3. Make it a daily habit: The best way I’ve found to do this is to grab a feed from Craigslist. After you search, according to your criteria and in the neighborhood you’re excited about and can afford, Craigslist will generate an RSS file for you (visible as an orange icon in your addressbar if you’re using Firefox, which you should be). Throw that link into your feedreader and check it daily along with your favorite blogs.
4. Check the place out: Virtually, of course. From your feedreader, you can jump to the Craigslist post and then jump to Google Maps. You might as well jump all the way to Street View and check the street out. Is it where you thought? Maybe take a virtual walk around the block, looking for cool coffee shops, laundromats, or peddlers of assorted sundries? Does it feel like home? Or, more importantly, does it feel like bothering to call for a viewing? Yes, even I like to actually visit the place before I move in.
5. Staying connected: It’s important to me that wherever I live has pretty good access to mass transit. I don’t know why I love mass transit so much, all the diverse faces and personalities, each with their own exciting fashion and smells—all with the same iPod earbuds. It really gets me. At any rate, the official MUNI maps might be helpful. Of course, if you’re more of a bicycler, walker, or excited to get a pair of his and her matching electric scooters powered by your residential solar panels and zoom around the city like Italy in the 60s… You should check out the SF Bicycle Coalition Bike Map & Walking Guide.

That’s just what I’ve picked up so far. It’s been working for me. Of course, I’ve only just recently started looking and haven’t actually found a place yet… but not for lack of finding possibilities. It’s just that sometimes they forget to mention that the bathroom has a brick wall in the middle of it or that they’ve used four different kinds of tiling for each room or that the house was built before refrigerators were invented so it sits in the middle of the living room. Stuff like that you can’t enter into Craigslist searches. As my friend Brianna mentioned the other day, “Each time I post an opening for a roommate, I have to add more things that I would’ve never thought I had to put in a roommate ad—like, please don’t cook kimchi at 4am.”

It’s not the first time O’Reilly has expressed his unmitigated hate toward the city of San Francisco. Almost exactly a year ago, he told Al Qaeda, “You want to blow up Coit Tower? Go ahead.” This time, his current rhetoric is more aimed at our gay pride parades, “pot shops”, and mocking of Christianity.

I should know better than to assume anything O’Reilly says is rooted in reality, but assertions that San Francisco is some sort of secular playground is ridiculous. I’ve attended services at Glide with a Jewish friend and managed to make it to a Solstice or Beltane party every once in a while, too. Further, the Mission District is very Catholic and there are neighborhood celebrations around Confirmations or Baptisms every week.

So what exactly are “San Francisco Values”?

He’s hitting on something with the gay pride parades. San Francisco definitely values diversity. The tremendous Chinese New Year Parade has been named one of the world’s top ten parades. I loved going last year and seeing all the little kids dressed like puppies for the Year of the Dog. Last week’s Dia de los Muertos celebration was a beautiful colored stone in the mosaic of cultures that is San Francisco.

The “pot shops” crack may be a crack at our hippie heritage and I’m pleased to say that the treehugger’s have left a lasting legacy. San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland are all in the Top 20 greenest cities in the U.S. according to the Green Guide. Personally, I take one of the four excellent forms of mass transit San Francisco has (none of which use gasoline) to work every day.

One thing that Bill has left out, however, is San Francisco’s value of innovation. I’ve long said that the DNA of San Francisco contains, across the board, the “I wonder what’s West of here?” gene. That spirit of imagination and adventure has given the world some amazing things. Considering just the illustrious internet marvels, the Bay Area is home to Apple, Craigslist, Flickr, Google, Yahoo, and YouTube among many, many others. Let’s not forget popsicles and fortune cookies!

One more invention that had its root in San Francisco that Bill O’Reilly may be especially thankful for and not even know it. On a foggy day in September, back in 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth brought to life a device without which the world would never come to know the No Spin Zone, the motherfucking television.

Diversity, sustainability, and innovation? Those are San Francisco values and Congress could sure use all of them.

The story begins with an anonymous article posted to IndyBay, an independent online news source. Here’s the long and short of it:

Our job at Tomkins and Scott, my job specifically, was to monitor Craigslist and summarily flag all postings which reflected negatively upon the city in any way. I am going public with this because, after 3 years of being a censor for Craigslist, I believe what we are doing is totally wrong.

I definitely have an axe to grind with the PR industry in general, so this article sucked me right in. Could our vision of online democratic utopia truly be so easily torn asunder by this “Black PR” strategy? Is the emerging global community just the latest playground for powermongers to co-opt and exploit?

But I was quickly reminded that the internet is a fundamentally more diverse and thus more healthy media environment than newspaper or television. The very first comment to the article was:

I’m checking to see if this is for real.

Craig

By the time the article from IndyBay got to Digg, it was already being sorted out. Writes one commenter:

I just googled Tomkins and Scott and found nothing (except this post). One might attribute this to the fact that the company is “underground” because it does “black PR,” but the wording of this post is very strange. It really sounds like a 12 year old trying to sound like a 30 year old.

Which was followed shortly afterward by:

I don’t know about the rest of Diggers, but I don’t like to go off half-cocked. Dugg nonetheless for a cool conspiracy theory. Also marked as possibly inaccurate. Let’s see some proof.

And finally:

I sure wish someone would have asked me, I asked the guy, and he admitted it’s a hoax.

There are people doing really nasty PR stuff, and netvocates and also fls-dci have been accused of very ugly stuff. Check out the investigative journalists at patriotproject.com, look up their work on swiftboaters.

Craig

One way to look at the whole situation is that an untrue story like the original post would never have been published in traditional media. Another is that the article itself was describing how easy it is to fool the new media. But at the end of the day, community feedback took a dishonest article about a dishonest practice and managed to uncover the truth of the situation (i.e. while this particular instance was a hoax, it is describing a real threat). That feedback simply doesn’t exist in traditional media. Which is why we get things like half of America believing that Iraq had WMDs and bad math on the cover of Business Week.

In essence what we’ve seen are sources of increasingly less authority all safeguarding the validity of whatever they exist in contrast to. Craigslist keeps watch on mainstream media, IndyBay keeps watch on Craigslist, Digg keeps watch on IndyBay, and the commenters keep watch on Digg. The truth seems to be a recursive function.