Delocate me

AS ESPRESSO-CRAVING visitors to Starbucks.com know, the coffee juggernaut's website features a Store Locator, an interactive tool permitting interstate travelers and wayward college students to determine the location of the nearest Starbucks outlet, which shouldn't be too hard, since by May 31 there were 6,751 of them in the United States alone. Plug in the address of the Gap store on Newbury Street, for example, and 39 Starbucks show up within a 2-mile radius, including 10 nearby on Newbury and Boylston streets and Huntington Avenue.

For those who would prefer to get caffeinated somewhere, anywhere, else, there's another option: Delocator.net. Launched as a political art project by the ''tactical media collective" Finishing School in April, the website invites coffee drinkers to enter their zip codes into its Delocator, which serves up the addresses of the closest non-Starbucks cafes from a burgeoning user-created database. In its Delocator manifesto, the LA-based collective explains its animus toward Starbucks, which, they contend, has eliminated ''subjectivity" and ''variance" not only in its coffee drinks and interior design but from its employees and, ultimately, its customers, too.

Delocator.net allows users to download tools for creating their own delocation site. Delocation may be catching on: Protesting Alanis Morissette's recent decision to sell an acoustic version of her album ''Jagged Little Pill" exclusively in Starbucks stores for the first six weeks of its release, the anticorporate magazine Stay Free! has created a primitive online Alanis Morissette Delocator that directs users to Cat Power, Neko Case, Gillian Welch, and other ''small-label female singer/songwriters who are not Alanis Morissette."