Technorati, a search engine for blogs, just passed the 1 billion mark of links tracked in its database. This milestone was announced tonight by Technorati founder David Sifry at a Technorati user salon that took place near their offices in San Francisco. Here’s some photos shot at tonight’s event.

Technorati makes exstensive use of tags. Tags can be used for any keyword or category. For instance, at the bottom of this post, you’ll notice that I have added a tag for “technorati”. When you visit Technorati’s page for that tag, you will see all the blogs (like this one) that have “technorati” listed as a tag or category, as well as photos from Flickr (including those I shot tonight) and links from Furl & Delicious with the same tag.

Of course one of the main features of Technorati is searching for keywords or urls in blogs. It works like other search engines, except in this case instead of searching everything on the internet, the search is specific to blogs. You can even create “watchlists” for keywords and Technorati will create a custom RSS feed that you can subscribe to keep track of blogs that reference those keywords.

Technorati ranks all of the blogs they index in what they call their “Cosmos”. Here are the top 100 blogs in the Technorati Cosmos. You’ll notice that our good friends at Boing Boing are topping the charts these days and so far they are the undisputed champions of the Blogosphere (yeah, I never thought I would use that word either). The Technorati Cosmos will show how many links and how many sources of those links each indexed blog has. If you have a blog, do an ego search and see who’s linking to you and how you rank. As word gets out about your blog, you’ll be able to watch your empire grow.

Ben Brown (editor of the newist “ist” Austinist and accidental host of the final after party of SXSW Interactive) and Adam Mathes (aka the Google Bomber) have just launched Consumating. Consumating is an online social network for dating that uses tags (similar to what is utilized by Technorati, Flickr, etc.) and weekly questions to help people connect online and, if all goes well, offline. It also uses quite a bit of AJAX and no, I’m not talking about the stuff you clean your sink with.

Hot nerdy girls and indie rock boys! With glasses!

Meet hipsters, bloggers, freaks and geeks in your area by showing off your quirky personality with zany answers to our constantly rotating questions. Find cute nerds to hook up with in our people browser!

This Friday, April 1st is the high holy day of The First Church of the Last Laugh which means it’s time for the 27th annual Saint Stupid’s Day Parade. Meet at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco at noon. Dress stupid.

The First Church of the Last Laugh, worlds fastest growing snack religion, 150% less dogma (it’s a lite religion) one holy day a year and april first is it.

You’d think after 26 years we could have gotten it right, but no, we, the one pretty true church, the FIRST CHURCH of the LAST LAUGH, of which you are already a member, need to try again. It’s the sidewalk version this year so bring pennies, socks and old loser lottery tickets for the stations of stupid. Noise makers and costumes befitting the tenor of the times and a deep sense of your own insignifigance. Kick off at noon in the Embarcadero plaza area, then thru the financial district. Free lunch.

Here are some stupid photos I shot in 2004 and 2003. More photos in the FCLL archive.

Later on after the parade, make sure to check out the action-packed, Church of the SubGenius infused St. Stupid’s Day after parade blowout at 12 Galaxies in San Francisco.

This Friday, April 1st will be the 20th anniversary of the annual New York April Fools’ Day Parade. The parade starts at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street and proceeds down to Washington Square Park. Each year a “King of Fools” is crowned from the throng of celebrity impersonators that march in the parade. Who will take the throne this year? The competion looks pretty good:

Marching celebrity look-alike fools will include: Donald Trump handing out pink slips while wearing one; Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger shouting “girlie man!”; Ex New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey announcing “I am a gay American”; Sponge Bob screaming “I am not gay!”; Jimmy Swaggert looking to kills gays if they look at him romantically; Bill O’Reilly looking for lust; Anna Nicole Smith looking for money; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales looking for someone to torture; Bill Burkett handing out forged documents to any reporter who will take them; Jeff Gannon, White House pseudo-reporter, handing out fake IDs; Zell Miller ranting “Dissent is treason!”; Howard Dean just ranting; Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps toasting the crowd again and again; Prince Harry dressed as a Nazi looking for the Halloween Parade; and Ann Coulter being Ann Coulter.

Here’s the press release for this event that was sent to us by our friend Joey Skaggs, The New York April Fools’ Committee Chair .

Dan James has created an amazing post card to contribue to our Laughing Squid post card series. You can find these new post cards in and around San Francsico and they will be available at the Yumfactory/Laughing Squid table at this year’s APE.

When you get a chance, make sure to check out Dan’s fantastic, labyrinthian website ghostshrimp. There’s some great stuff in there.

Here are some photos (they’re up on Flickr as well) I shot at this year’s RoboGames (see previous post). What a great event. Congratulations David, Simone and crew!

There’s still one day left (Sunday, March 27th) of RoboGames 2005. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, try to make it down to San Francisco State University tomorrow to catch all the robo-action.

Last week the infamous UK graffiti artist Banksy covertly installed his own artwork in four of New York’s major art museums: The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Natural History.

The Wooster Collective has full coverage of Banksy’s brilliant museum hit.

Dressed as a British pensioner, over the last few days Banksy entered each of the galleries and attached one of his own works, complete with authorative name plaque and explanation.

I’m sure our friends at the BLF must be quite proud of the wonderful execution and style Banksy used on this museum improvement.

UPDATE: The New York Times ran a story on this yesterday: “Need Talent to Exhibit in Museums? Not This Prankster”

RoboGames (formerly ROBOlympics), the largest gathering of competition robots in the world, takes place this weekend from March 25-27 at San Francisco State University. This is an amazing event produced by our good friend David Calkins and is definately worth checking out. Here are some photos I shot at last year’s event.

Engineers from 14 countries have brought the best robots on the planet
to SF to see who’s best. Art robtos! BattleBots! Walking Androids!
Soccer Playing robots! Hexapods, BiPeds, and SumoBots! 43 events in
all.

UPDATE: Here are my photos from this year’s RoboGames.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence will celebrating their 26th anniversarythis Easter Sunday in San Francisco’s Dolores Park with their annual “Indulgence In The Park!”.

It would be a sin not to atttend.

The fun starts at 11:30a with an egg hunt and cake walk for the kids. Fabulous entertainment provided by the Ethel Merman Experience, Trauma Flintstone, Kitten on the Keys and Polkacide! Our Easter Bonnet Contest starts at 1p and our infamous Hunky Jesus Contest will be at 3:15p. The Sisters will also be collecting donations for our Easter Grant fund.

During the last few days you may have noticed some changes going on around here at casa Laughing Squid. laughingsquid.org and our blog have both been merged into laughingsquid.com, replacing the former splash page. We were starting to suffer from a multiple personality complex and I think this will help pull things back together. Now all of the art and culture content can be accessed through laughingsquid.com. Some content is still on the .org side, for instance The Squid List Calendar, but now everything is linked through .com. The hosting website still is where it has always been over at laughingsquid.net.

BunnyJam 5: Adventures in BunnyHOPolis! takes place this Saturday, March 26th in Oakland. Hop on over to bunnyjam.com for more info.

Join the mass EGGsodus! Hop from HARE to absurdity! Tumble through the RABBIT hole and discover a congrEGGation of bunnies in BunnyHOPolis, an
EGGstrordinary city sprawling with EGGsistential questions: Will you take the red jellybean or the blue jellybean? Is BunnyHOPolis a physical state or
state of mind? HOPpiness itself? Or an EGGsercise in FURtility? Oh hippety hoppers of harebrained HOPpenings, HARE we go again!!!

Here are a few photos from the last Bunnyjam I went to in 2003. It was quite a hare raising experience.

Last night, on The Odeon Bars’s main stage at the WordPress 100K Party, WordPress’s founder Matt Mullenweg (pictured on the right) announced that he is creating a new company for WordPress and that international man of mystery, Jonas Luster (pictured on the left), will be employee #1.

SFist’s own Jackson West scooped the story and filed his report live from the bar and Ryan King shot some great video of Matt’s annoucement.

You can find the photos that I shot of this momentus occasion both in the gallery and on Flickr.

UPDATE: Matt has posted an update about what happend with WordPress Inc. on the WordPress Codex.

At SXSW Matt mentioned that WordPress 1.5 is just about to hit 100,000 downloads. Previously he had hosted an amazing upgrade party at his place, so I asked him if he was going to do anything special for hitting the 100K mark and that if so, I would love to help put something together. Well, tomorrow night, Tuesday, March 22nd, Chicken John has given us the keys to The Odeon Bar so for the “WordPress 100,000 Party”.

If you haven’t been there yet, The Odeon is a great little bar down on Mission Street near where it intersects Valencia Street (yes, they do actually intersect). Chicken John, bought the place 4 years ago and has been providing “unlikely or unconventional, but compelling variety acts to the people of San Francisco”, such as the spectacular “Ask Dr. Hal” shows that take place every Wednesday night. As many of you know, The Odeon has been our little clubhouse in The Mission and is home to our two big squids that hang on the wall in the back.

If you plan on coming to the party, please RSVP through the Evite so we can get a better idea how many people will be coming.

After leaving SXSW, I went down to San Antonio to visit Rackspace, the data center where all of Laughing Squid’s servers are located. We have been with Rackspace since May of 1999 and they have been simply amazing. Their support is unparalleled and network uptime has been 100% for years. If you need a dedicated server, these are the guys you should be using.

Here are some photos from my Rackspace visit.

I would like to especially thank Barry, Jason and Lisa for giving me a tour of Rackspace’s headquarters, introducing me to everyone and taking me out for some great Tex-Mex. Thanks as well to Bob for the comprehensive data center tour. I’m still digesting all of that info. That guy really knows his megawatts. Finally, I want to thank Team C for taking me out for drinks after their shift, Luke for buying dinner and especially Mark for being my personal chauffeur and his hilarious interpretive readings of Wikipedia entries from my Treo 650. Team C rocks!

Well, the rumors were true, Yahoo has in fact bought Flickr. Pretty amazing for a product that is not even out of beta yet. It will be interesting to see how Google reacts to this one. Here’s the official announcement from Flickr’s blog.

Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!! Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!

If you are not familiar with Flickr, it is by far the best online photo management website out there. Here’s Laughing Squid’s photostream on Flickr.

Flickr was an invaluable resource at this year’s SXSW Interactive and was really put to the test. Here’s the SXSW Interactive Flickr Pool Set.