I was meeting with a group of freelance journalists, talking about my ideas for making content for a specific neighborhood rather than the entire Net, when one lady replied, “oh,  you mean ‘hyperlocal.’ ”

Did I?

I admit I was chagrined to be so easily categorized, but then, I didn’t really think I was inventing the wheel.

Here is the wikipedia definition:     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlocal

I find the suggestion of corporate penetration into hyperlocal markets to be disturbing but predictable. Also surprised to discover the term was coined in 1991.

I never said I was the inventor of this idea. I discovered it as an answer to the idea of writing content for the entire world “a la blog.”

Just watched an episode of “House” this week about a woman who constantly blogged everything about her life all the time. She had a world wide audience.

This is the antithesis of what I am interested in doing right now. I am less interested in “sharing” the daily details of my life than I am in searching out and articulating the emerging personality and stories of a specific geographic location; in my case the Valencia Street Corridor. There is a lot happening there right now. It is an exciting, tumultuous time for the neighborhood- going from down-home Mission to Hipster Heaven.

The change is more complicated than that. It is the 21st century marching in with guns blazing to an unsuspecting locale. It is the gay, Latin, white, bike, coffee, blogging, literary, comic book, zine, green, vegan, laptop,gang, twitter,epicure collision. All kinds of interesting players. All kinds of interesting history colliding with the science fiction future.

In the middle are the usual collection of innocent souls who are caught up in this temporal and cultural whirlwind. The world they knew is changing right before them. THEY are changing. This is how culture works. This is how history works. This is what the millennium is all about. Can I tell that story? Can I be a part of that story?

I’m not convinced this is all hyperbole. I am convinced that the world is changing at a very rapid rate right now because it is being  hammered by social, economic, meteorological, and political forces like hot iron on an anvil.

I’m not intelligent enough to grasp the greater picture- it is beyond my comprehension to know how this will all play out.  The Spin Doctors, the bankrupt Corporate Culture, the People vs. the Elite. Where is it going? Another French Revolution? ( Reading “Tale of Two Cities” right now.)

What I can do is talk to people locally;  try to understand their stories, try to find some themes that resonate with this part of the planet and echo them back. What happens next, I have no idea.

For me, that is part of the fun of it.

I understand that this very post may be read by people anywhere in the world. That is inevitable with this medium. More and more, I am writing FOR a small community in my neighborhood. Anyone else who wants to come along is welcome.

This has been a great month for me to get to know a lot of people in the local cartoonist  scene. I’m pretty impressed with their talent.  The online hangout is

http://cartoonistconspiracysf.wordpress.com/

The past two meetings have been collaborative exercises. The most recent one can be seen here:

http://issuu.com/cartoonistconspiracysf/docs/timecop_ccsf_1-28-10

The basic idea is each person starts with a single panel and then passes it to their right to the next artist. Then, with two panels to go, the next artist to the right begins the process of reconciling the pages to each other. The last artist has the transition panel from one page to the next.

It is a fun exercise but it makes for a pretty rugged narrative. Still, the random nature of it has its charm.

It seems like the more I know, the more complex and challenging the 3D becomes. This latest piece is part of a series of urban portraits of the Valencia Corridor, the spiritual home of “Not Quite Here.”

The portraits themselves are quite lovely. In addition to art prints, they will all be used as backgrounds in the second volume of the series.

Just putting the finishing touches on this one.