It’s so ironic, praising the coolness of Twitter on an old school blog like this, with manicured images and aggregated content, designed for prime time viewing on Safari and Internet Explorer. That was so, like, 2008.

The demand for leaner, faster-paced Web content is more than neural. Now, the web’s been stripped down to its dendrites through mini-blog formats like Tumblelog and even more micro-minimally, Twitter — whiplash-fast, the closest thing to mental telepathy. Twitter makes economic sense, too.

America is wising up to a fleecing by cell phone companies. So say activists critical of mega-markups for mini-messages by Big Cellular.

The Consumerist says Verizon text messages are priced 4,876% above the company’s other cell data services. TechCrunch places AT&T’s texting tab at $1,310 per megabyte.

And though some Twitter through their cell phones, sending and receiving tweets as SMS messages that can carry heavy tariffs, many others use mobile device web interfaces including iPhone applications, paying nothing for unlimited tweeting beyond their Internet connection, never sweating monthly message limits. For its part, Twitter swears it will never charge users.

Beyond the bucks, aren’t we simply over pajama’d no-life bloggers? Or worse — being one? Twitter lets you broadcast micro-bulletins known as “tweets” from a code-free interface as simply and quickly as sending a text message — but with interactivity, linkage and tweet-anywhere mobility. With Twitter, we can blog-zapp everyone in our posse, on the fly, from the party, and totally free. Twitter as text message-killer? Yup — and quite possibly the death of blogging as we know it.

Anyway, what can’t be said in 140 characters — Twitter’s max message length? A just-released Twitter Style Guide from a San Francisco word design collective will “help you be more effective when communicating in small spaces.” Good! We’re talking seriously seminal lingo, as disciplined as haiku.

Despite Twitter’s allure, not everyone’s convinced there’s much cosmic significance in knowing what a former high school classmate is having for lunch, though Twitter can be a great tool for journalists.

Reporter Charles Feldman is using Twitter to hunt down interviewees for an upcoming story. Need a quick answer to a question? Tweet your best sources, all at once. The Los Angeles Times is hip to Twittering — I love the inside scoops and newsroom chatter from its City Desk feed. L.A.’s TV and radio stations are another story, slow to embrace Twittering as a way to stay hooked up with viewers and listeners between tune-ins. Go figure.

Tweetie is the best iPhone app I’ve found for mobile Twittering. Among its features, the ability to tune in on every tweet originating nearby — including total strangers.

At the 2km range, I’ve monitored real time goings-on at local pubs, reviews of an R&B band as it played, the location of a mysterious fireworks display, and news that Ikea was simply too mobbed to bother driving down to Carson. Diablo Cody and John Cleese are among Twittering celebs who occasionally fire off fun-blurbs. Barack Obama was a Twitterer — until presidency ate up his tweet time.

But then there’s 1indination, aka Rebecca, a “Podcasting Cyborg Odd UberGeek Nocturnal Goddess” and whose Twittering compulsion is legend here within a 2km radius of Venice Beach where Twitter is often all Rachel, all the time. Does she never sleep??? You go, girl.

At least she’s not pitching get-rich-quick scams. Spam is a growth sector at Twitter through tools like TWPLY, a service that forwards tweets as email (along with a helping of crapmail). TweetTornado games Twitter through relentless automation, building mega communities of spam victims sucked in by vanity and phony avatar pix of awesome babes. (“She’s hot! If she’s following me, I gotta follow her!”) Gotcha! Cue the porn ads.

Twitter and its followers are fiercely anti-spam, policing posts and quickly 86ing offenders. Still, as Jeff Goldblum liked to say in Jurassic Park, “Life will find a way.” So will spammers.

Where’s it all heading? Despite a raging recession, venture capitalists pumped $35 million into Twitter on February 13, even though the service said it didn’t need the money and has yet to raise a dime in revenue. Still, Twitter is here with a million-plus users and growing faster than fungus, perhaps just waiting to be bought out by Google.

Aren’t we all?

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The LMU Lions basketball broadcast is running late so Demolisten won’t make its 6pm Friday start time. The engineer’s MIA, the server room locked so video can’t stream. But singer-songwriter Nathan Payne is in the house and the fridge is full of free Red Bull. The show will go on from Loyola Marymount University’s KXLU, its 2,900-watt FM signal beaming across L.A.’s west side from a tower atop the student union.

Producer-host Fred Kiko is off tonight so Octavius [left] is hosting solo and opens with tunes from The Blank Tapes and Paris Hilton Motherfuckers. I’m a studio guest for the episode which is archived here, digging the music through the only functioning headphones around. Octavius’ ear buds are plugged into a tiny transistor radio in his shirt pocket.

Much all of KXLU is pretty beat — college radio gear that’s seen better days, fully upholstered in band stickers. Yet these studios are a magnet for SoCal art bands, garage bands and now bands including The Soft Hands from Long Beach, The Spires of Ventura, L.A.’s Faux for Real and Daphne the Painted Lady — to name a few of scores of performers lighting up L.A.’s vibrant new music scene.

The Soft Hands

Tonight’s show features cuts from the Inland Empire’s Halloween Swim Team, L.A.’s Eagle and Talon, and Emma and the Ghosts. Never heard of ‘em? That’s cool. That’s why you’re here.

Demolisten is the half-life echo of FM’s progressive days when local bands were nurtured by local stations — before Big Media injected satellite-fed Muzak and focus-grouped playlists into the airways, mummifying radio’s sad young corpse. [See: Bruce Springsteen's "Radio Nowhere."]

Demolisten is one of the last broadcast venues devoted to demo tracks from unsigned bands. Fred and Octavius get ‘em in the mail every day — hand-made CDs in lovingly hand-crafted jackets — one-off expressions of hope, dreams and creativity from young artists with technology in their hands and music on their minds, the soundtrack of Tomorrow bubbling up fresh and pure.

Nathan Payne blew into the studio after a major criss-cross trek across America, playing gigs wherever, selling copies of his “American Infidel” album and personally silk-screened T-shirts from the back of his car.

The webcam’s working now. Chelsea Clitton, writer and sometimes performance artist also known as Curious Kite, streams Payne’s session live on Stikam.com. The video’s archived here.

Payne previews his Sunday night appearance at Good Hurt on Venice Boulevard where he’ll sing tales of lust, desire, hypocrisy — and scathing indictments of George W. Bush. Yeah, a genuine protest singer in the Woody Guthrie-Bob Dylan tradition, a voice of dissent in a world of fat-’n-happy consumerism. Go figure.

Paris Hilton Motherfuckers

Octavius is busy updating the show’s online playlist, logging transmitter readings and taking calls, IMs and email from listeners. (“Hey man, I don’t have a computer. Can you mail the concert calendar to me?”)

Demolisten is raw, it is art. It is perhaps the most crucial two-hour show on Los Angeles radio. Really.

Would any of us be here if it not for unsigned protozoans down deep in the ocean? If undiscovered krill weren’t surfacing, ready to give their all to a humpback?

Pull the plug on essential lifeforms at the roots of any food chain — the new growth that assures preservation of the species — and reality implodes.

Years-past hopefuls sending tracks to Demolisten have included Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N’ Roses and Faith No More. Write off tonight’s bands at your peril. I bet God tunes in to Demolisten, just to see how his musical offspring are doin’.

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Big hair, bigger ego, an enormous sexual appetite and a stream of consciousness summed up by Russell Brand himself as “bionic, Byronic, ironic” with influences that range from Kerouac to Morrissey.

The bed-headed comic’s got a two-hour Saturday night BBC Radio 2 program and a new TV series, Russell Brand’s Ponderland. But is America ready for the next big thing in British humor?

Whether crediting a caller’s pheromones for the pigeons mating on his window ledge, railing at the Chinese to get out of Tibet, or accusing Blackpool’s mayor of embezzling municipal funds to finance a private brothel, Brand’s humor is playfully psychotic, often self-deprecating — wordplay on steroids, a thesaurus spew of major proportions.

Just the sort of thing you’d imagine from a thirty-something former booze-and-heroin addict who’s dad hooked him up with hookers in Russell’s teenage years. A guy so randy Bob Geldof kept daughter Peaches far from Ibiza lest Brand get his hands on the teenbabe.

“Russell Brand came out of nowhere,” a British couple told me over fish and chips at Danny’s Deli in Venice the other night. Though not exactly right. He began as a British MTV presenter at 18, and was promptly fired after showing up for air dressed as Osama bin Laden on September 12, 2001.

Now, he’s being promoted as London’s next mayor — though the whole idea of a Colbertesque promotion-stunt candidacy seems a bore to Brand, a concept to work for a few moments on air, but nothing to make a career. ADD works for this guy.

Playback: Russel Brand The Best Bits
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Brand is doing for stand-up, TV and radio comedy what “Flight of the Conchords,” (a former BBC radio series) has done for situation comedy.

The post-modern sensibilities of New Zealand folk/comedy duo Jermaine Clement and Brett McKenzie could easily be seen as an extension of Ricky Gervais’ “The Office,” thought by many to trump the made-for-America version. (Happily, plans for a dumbed-down U.S. treatment of “Absolutely Fabulous” were scrapped while Patsy and Edina were flying high.)

Brand recently crossed our country on an homage to Jack Kerouac, discovering the wonders of skull and crossboned cowboy boots along the way but scarcely blipping our radar. Here’s hoping he’s back soon, and that U.S. audiences listen up to a fresh, new voice.

You heard it here first, America.

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