When ex-Chronicle writer Delfin Vigil was shown the door as part of last spring's staff reduction, he did not go quietly. While still employed by the newspaper, he preemptively took out an ad in the Examiner which consisted of an essay he wrote, titled, "The Chronicle in Ruins."

Now, months after being laid off, he's making another statement -- albeit indirectly and mostly inadvertently.

Vigil's band, Amores Vigilantes, will be releasing their first record, "West Coast Kingdom," on Dec. 8. The record was recorded in the Chronicle's basement.

It wasn't so much a company-sanctioned setup as it was that Vigil, looking for a quiet place to work amid the ongoing turmoil, discovered in the basement a back room (used to store book-review books) so isolated that one had to pass through another back room (used to store newspapers) to get to it. Nearby was a bevy of abandoned printing presses and vast rooms used mainly for storing long-forgotten detritus.

A perfect place to record rock 'n roll, soundproofing included. Vigil soon took it upon himself to secret bandmates and instruments into the building on nights and weekends for sessions. His only audience: a janitor, a security guard and book-review editor Oscar Villalon, who happily relinquished sole deed to the space.

"At first I just started bringing my guitar in to work, and would go down there when I could get away," Vigil told BayNewser. "Then I started bringing in microphones and recorders. I had a whole studio overnight. Heck, I had a fridge in there. And when it came time to record, Fifth and Mission is such an easy place for everybody to meet."

Vigil's editor, Joe Brown, delighted to see someone in the building actively embrace an alternative form of artistic expression, endorsed the effort. A different editor, however, got wind of what was happening, and, under auspices that the company needed to use the space, kicked Vigil out. "Up until the day I left, they never did use that space again," he said.

All told, Vigil estimates that two-thirds of the record was written or recorded in the Chronicle's basement. For a taste, click here.

"The thing about that building is the people who built it had big dreams for the place," he said. "It still has a lot of soul -- it's just that the people who run the place find new and creative ways to suffocate it."

If there's a big-picture analogy, perhaps it's that both sanctioned and unsanctioned creativity has been going on within the walls at the Chronicle for some time; the similarity between them is that management can't seem to sufficiently monetize either one.

Amores Vigilantes will be playing in San Francisco at Cafe du Nord on Dec. 17.

Amores Vigilantes members K.C. Staubach (left) and Delfin Vigil (right) flank San Francisco iconoclast Frank Chu.

If the Internet totally upended where we buy our presents for Aunt Betty and Cousin Bill, social media is about to revolutionize how we decide what to get them in the first place.

A new study from Deloitte says at least 17 percent of holiday shoppers will use social media to build their gift lists this year, including finding discounts and coupons, researching potential ideas, peeking at their friends' and family members' wish lists, and sharing their own wish lists.

Mobile phones are also going to play a bigger role, with more of us using them to locate stores (55 percent), research prices (45 percent), read product reviews (31 percent), and even search for discounts and coupons (32 percent).

A quarter of the over 10,000 people who participated in the study said they planned to actually make purchases via their phones. That's likely to shake things up even more for brick-and-mortar retailers. As a commenter on Click Z pointed out: "As phones get smarter I expect to see more window shopping with purchases actually being made cheaper online."

Image: WordPlay on HubPages

Remember that letter Governor Schwarzenegger sent to Tom Ammiano a little while back, the one that had the hidden "F**k you" message in it?

We just discovered it on document-sharing site Scribd. Here it is for your Friday afternoon viewing pleasure. (Remember: Read the first letter in each line to view the double-secret-probation coded message that the governor's office protested was entirely coincidental.)

Ammiano Letter From Schwarzenegger -- Hidden message if you take first letter of every line

Functionally, it doesn't change anything. Graphically, it's a change of only four words.

Emotionally, people's worlds are rocking.

Today, Twitter replaced it's ubiquitous question, "What are you doing?" located above the text box used to post messages, with the question, "What's Happening?"

This has drawn deeper examination around the Web than one might imagine.

"It's a wise move because 'What are you doing' seemed too narrow for the platform. Broadening the question to match all the things people use twitter for was necessary," wrote TechCrunch.

The Chronicle's Benny Evangelista wrote that "Twitter may be attempting to change a perception that microblogging is only used by people who want to update what they are having for lunch, especially as the company tries to spread its reach into businesses."

Hell, Valleywag went so far as to call in a Welsh linguist, who offered up that "Twitter has become steadily more discursive, with people maintaining threads and introducing a great deal more interaction, rather than posting isolated tweets. As a result the focus has shifted from the individual to the group, and a more open question is required to capture this emphasis. What-doing looks inward. What-happening looks outward. It's a natural development, it seems to me."

Even company co-founder Biz Stone weighed in, writing on the company blog:

People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, "What's happening?" A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive.

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering "What are you doing?" with "Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee," at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it's not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore -- starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?"

We don't expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter, but maybe it'll make it easier to explain to your dad.

Much ado about nothing? Perhaps. At least now people can ask Stone, "What's happening . . . with your business model?"

Turns out the Bay Area is the place to be for online video for reasons beyond San Bruno-based YouTube.

Nielsen's numbers for October show YouTube maintaining a healthy lead in overall video views, topping second-place Hulu 6.6 billion to 632 million.

In third place, however, was Facebook, with more than 217 million video streams served -- up from 10th place in September. That vaulted them over Bing, Yahoo and several other sites.

"Facebook's rapid growth in online video during the last year illustrates the site's evolution from simply a communications focused tool to a media portal," said Nielsen Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs in a CNET report. "Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online."

Overall, the amount of video viewed via Facebook grew by 1,840 percent, year over year.

Speaking at an event in London yesterday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch's plans to implement paywalls was doomed to fail, the Guardian (UK) reports.

Murdoch "should be looking at [the Web] as an opportunity to do something radically different and find out how to make a ton of money out of being radically open rather than some money by being ridiculously closed," Stone said.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, speaking at the same event, concurred: "I am sure that during the transition from horses to automobiles there were some people bemoaning the loss of horse transport."

Is Google beginning to feel a little heat from Bing? It sort of looks that way, given that it's created a bunch of ads (which they're calling "Search Stories") showing how various folks might consider using Google to satisfy their information requirements.

Whatever. We'll take any excuse to inject a little Gotham into our day.

The recent social-network-scam-gate so lovingly exposed by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has finally come home to roost -- or at least that's what a Sacramento law firm hopes.

Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has filed a federal class-action lawsuit against both Zynga (the primary game-maker that allowed shady businesses to offer virtual currency in exchange for peoples' promises to sign up for programs that they didn't understand and which cost them more money than they realized) and Facebook, through which Zynga's games reached a widespread audience.

At stake: $5 million.

Despite the fact that the dubious actions in question originated from neither company, both, claims the suit, were complicit in their continued profiteering, and themselves made large amounts of money in the process.

Proving that Palo Alto-based Facebook was knowingly in on the action could provide some courthouse drama. Perhaps “The Social Network,” now filming, will want to save space at the end for a postscript.

Read the entire court filing at Valleywag.

Fortune's Brainstorm Tech blog has a nice little write up of SOMA-based Sugar Inc., parent company of the PopSugar family of blogs.

The three-and-a-half year old company, which is set to become profitable this quarter, is notable for several reasons, writes Adam Lashinsky, including for the way it makes money.

Rather than relying solely on advertising, Sugar has set up a system where it gets commissions on from retailers when their readers go shopping.

"Sugar is a nascent success and an example of what magazines may become," Lashinsky says. "It doesn't provide an answer to the question of what will become of long-form journalism, because it chose a segment that wasn't exactly bubbling over with ponderous feature stories to begin with. All the same, that something is working in publishing these days, and that's at least some hopeful news."

Oakland Local, the new non-profit community news Web site that launched exactly a month ago, is doing so well that founder Susan Mernit says she's accelerating their plan to implement advertising.

Mernit told BayNewser that, according to her original plan, she didn't expect to be able to run ads until the spring, because she didn't think the site would be attracting 10,000 unique visitors per month—the magic number when sites can think about selling ads—until then.

Instead, according to Google Analytics, the site hit 9,720 uniques since its launch on October 19—and not just from Oakland, but from San Francisco, Piedmont, and Pleasanton as well.

"I think we're offering something that doesn't exist in Oakland or in the Bay Area, which is a really diverse, progressive site that is open to community news and multiple perspectives," Mernit said. "We can't provide the range of police coverage that the Oakland Tribune and sfgate cover because we don't have that kind of newsroom, but we're doing a lot more with food access issues and environment issues which are very important in this area."

The Oakland A's, which have seemed to change flagship radio stations every season (if not more often then that) in recent years, have bought themselves a measure of stability, agreeing to a 10-year contract with San Francisco's XTRA Sports 860 (KTRB), starting next spring.

"This announcement represents a major milestone in the broadcast coverage of Oakland A's baseball," said Ken Pries, the team's vice president of broadcasting and communications, in a release.

At the very least, it'll give A's fans a decent signal, with 50,000 watts. The station's all-sports format will also be a boon; unlike previous non-sports homes, the station has significant leeway to build additional A's-related programming around the team's schedule.

The team's broadcast team won't be affected, with announcers Ken Korach, Vince Cotroneo and Ray Fosse all returning.