On the Sunday following Gnomedex, Niall Kennedy and I started exploring Seattle. We traveled north of downtown to neighborhood of Fremont as in The Artists Republic of Fremont aka the Center of the Universe. It’s a very interesting place that has changed quite a bit over the years, but it is still best known for it’s wonderful public art and offbeat character. Fremont’s motto is “Delibertus Quirkus” which translates to “Freedom to be Peculiar”.

Our first stop was the infamous Troll, who lives under the Aurora Bridge. The day we were there, a group of actors were doing a production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” on and around the troll, which was part of the summer Shakespeare on the Troll series.

Our next destination was Emil Venkov’s notorious Statue of Vladimir Lenin from Slovakia. On that day, Lenin looked a little different. We just happened to be in Seattle during Seattle Pride and Lenin was dressed-up in drag for the weekend’s festivities.

After Lenin, we stopped by Fremont’s main landmark, The Rocket, which was created from an actual Cold War era rocket. Our final destination was Richard Beyer’s The Interurban Sculpture, which consists of five people and a dog waiting for a train that will never arrive. People like to dress-up and decorate this sculpture for special occasions. When we were visiting, they were in between make-overs, but one of the statues was wearing a hat and necklace and reading a book about Technorati.

The Fremont Chamber of Commerce website has detailed write-ups on each of these pieces of public art, as well as many other notable Fremont attractions.

Fremont’s big annual event is the Fremont Arts Council Solstice Parade which coincides with the Fremont Arts Fair, both of which we just missed by a week. Maybe next year.

Here’s my complete Fremont photo gallery.

Yo-yo master and sticker propagator, David Capurro, sent this our way. If you happen to come across one of our Laughing Squid stickers in an interesting location and get a photo of it, let us know. I’ll post some of them here.

Apple just released iTunes 4.9 which now supports podcasting. They even have a new Podcast Directory which already features over 3000 podcasts and includes Adam Curry’s PodFinder, a free service that delivers weekly podcast content. Adam was Saturday’s keynote speaker at last week’s Gnomedex 5.0 conference.

With iTunes 4.9 you can now browse, find, sample and subscribe to thousands of free podcasts — radio shows delivered over the Internet to your computer — then sync them to your iPod and listen anytime, anywhere.

Gnomedex 5.0 is over. What a great conference. I met a bunch of really interesting people are involved with some really cool stuff. Many thanks to Chris Pirillo and Ponzi for organizing such an amazing event. I’ll definitely be back next year.

Here are my (non-Flickr) Gnomedex 5.0 photo galleries:

Registration Party

Day 1

Networking Bash

Day 2

These are a few highlights from my Gnomedex 5.0 experience:

- I met a bunch of the guys from Bryght (they host community content websites based on Drupal) who where down from Vancouver. Really great folks. They convinced Lee to have a BBQ before the event started which was an excellent way to kick off the weekend.

- In his keynote speech, Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, announced that Longhorn will be supporting RSS, including IE. All the Microsoft people there were wearing t-shirts that said “Longhorn [heart symbol] RSS”. They are also developing some RSS enhancements called Simple List Extensions, which they will be releasing under the Creative Commons license and they even showed a video of Lawrence Lessig showing his support for this project. It’s great to see Microsoft get behind an open standard like RSS and include it in the next version of their browser (most other browsers already have this feature). There’s more info about all of this on the IE Blog.

- Podcasting had a major presence at the conference, with both Dave Winer and Adam Curry giving keynotes. Adam recorded his keynote as his Daily Source Code episode #200 and ever popular The Gillmor Gang recorded a podcast from stage as well. Eric Rice and may others were podcasting all over the place and some, like Eric, Bre Pettis, and Steve Garfield were also video blogging (vlogging) the event. There was even Podbot, the podcasting robot.

- We all agreed that we need to find a simple solution to RSS synching as well as figure out the best way to deal with advertising through RSS feeds.

- Phillip Torrone, associate editor of Make Magazine, showed off a bunch of hack projects, including, the Portable Rotary Phone, an old rotary phone that you can insert your SIM card into and turn it into a cell phone.

- I met Abe Fettig and Scott McMullan from JotSpot who were working on a really cool live editing feature of their wiki script. I helped them with some Safari QA work when they first launched it at the conference.

- The Friday night Networking Bash was a really good time and it took place in the ultra-modern Seattle Public Library which looked like something out of Logan’s Run. The entire 4th floor is red, except for the bathrooms.

- Later Saturday night, Robert Scoble, the infamous “Microsoft Geek Blogger” organized a meetup at the Zig Zag Cafe as well as a breakfast the following morning. It was great hanging out with someone who works for Microsoft and is not afraid to speak his mind about that company’s actions and policies, especially when he disagrees with them. Robert was also the one who provided the bright red couch that was on stage during the conference and he and Chris Pirillo spent some “quality time” on it throughout the event.

Here are my photos from the 2nd and final day of Gnomedex 5.0 which concluded with Adam Curry’s keynote speech that he podcasted as Daily Source Code Episode #200. I’ve also uploaded a photoset of some our post-Gnomedex activities.

Thursday and Friday’s photos can be found here.

Here’s my first batch of photos from Gnomedex 5.0 or as Chris Pirillo calls it “the technology people aggregator”, starting with Lee LeFever’s Pre-Gnomedex BBQ on Thursday (Thanks Lee!), followed by the Registration Party, then the first full day of Gnomedex 5.0 on Friday which wrapped up nicely with the Networking Bash at the fabulous new Seattle Public Library. On the way back to the hotel, I though maybe I might have had too much to drink when I saw this.

Numerous geeks (myself included) are starting to arrive in Seattle for Gnomedex 5.0. This is really shaping up to be an amazing event. Chris and Ponzi are going all-out on this one. If you can’t make it in person, you can keep track of things with the Technorati tag page for Gnomedex. There’s sure to be plenty of live blogging and Flickr activity. Eric Rice will be hosting the live audio stream and as well as video blogging from the conference.

We are thinking about doing some touring around Seattle on Sunday. Of course at some point I will need to make a pilgrimage to Fremont to pay my regards to the troll (see photo above for a dirt encrusted version from 2003). Oh yeah, a trip to Archie McPhee over in Ballard is on the agenda as well. If you know of any pre or post-Gnomedex events or activities, please leave a comment.

Two the things I love about Seattle: good coffee and free Wi-Fi. Speaking of which, this post is coming to you from University Zoka, in U-Village (part of Seattle’s University District). This is the coffeehouse that is noted for being the unusual headquarters of Apple software development company Delicious Monster. Man, that was a good latte.

UPDATE 1: My photos from Thursday and Friday are now online.

UPDATE 2: Here are Saturday’s photos.

Laughing Squid presents Will Franken in “The Will Franken Fringe Benefit”, consisting of two completely different shows, one on Friday, June 24th and another on Saturday, June 25th, both at The Dark Room in San Francisco. Each show starts at 10pm and the admission is $10.

Will has been invited to the New York Fringe Festival and needs help getting there, so it’s time for a fundraiser. Will has appeared in numerous Laughing Squid events in the past and is one of our favorite performers in San Francisco. The guy is funny. You just need to see him in person, since his act is pretty much impossible to describe, although some people have given it their best shot. Will was recently named “Best Comedian” in SF Weekly’s Best of San Francisco 2005 issue.

Here’s Will’s explanation of his situation and why the need for a benefit:

I have been selected to participate in the New York Fringe Festival with one of my one-man shows. Unfortunately, this whole adventure, though a potentially rewarding career move, is financially demanding. Aside from the $500 acceptance fee, I also have to buy all the props that I can’t take on a plane, hire a tech guy out East, and cough up the money for airfare. The truth is my wife and I are bordering on destitute at the moment, but we both realize that in order to break through in the long run, I’m going to have to get a foothold in New York by representing San Francisco in this festival. Hence, we have the Will Franken Fringe Benefit. Two different shows over two different nights. Over these two nights, I’m going to passionately blast through some of my most well-known, rarely performed, and never-performed bits. If you missed last April’s “Good Luck With It” at the Marsh, I will be reprising parts of that show as well as some of my favorite sections from my earlier one-man shows. As always, there will be plenty of new material. Please, I beg you, if you’ve ever seen me before and dig what I do, please come down these nights and help me get to New York. We’ve never needed money this bad before and this is the time in our life where we definitely need one of those “Last scene in It’s A Wonderful Life” moments where everybody comes in with wads of cash.

photo: Joe Reifer

Warning! Meme alert: Stuff On My Cat

via: Culture Blog

SFGate has joined the community of San Francisco based blogs with their recently launched Culture Blog. Welcome to the neighboorhood!

Written by a group of columnists, reporters and editors from both the newspaper and Web site (see Bios), we’ll be posting daily items — newsy, opinionated, critical or simply silly — on our various arts, culture, media, and Web-related interests and obsessions.

The 4th incarnation of How to Destroy the Universe takes place this weekend at The Shipyard in Berkeley (Friday, June 24th & Saturday, June 25th) and at StudioZ in San Francisco (Sunday, June 26th). Laughing Squid is proud to once again sponsor this amazing event. The line up is spectacular and includes pyro-punk legends F-Space, Jim Mason’s ariel art show “Rigged”, Los Angeles Punk Pioneers 23-25 Year Re-Union, Rev Al’s post LA Cacophony creation The Art of Bleeding (who were in town a couple months ago at the now defunct Odeon Bar), the omnipresent The Extra Action Marching Band, V. Vale’s legendary RE/Search Publications, Otto von Stroheim’s Tiki News, wonderful film projections by Molli Simon and many, many others.

This years events takes this Invariant reference point, and Worm Holes past the Northern “Rave in the other Desert” to present an Apocalyptic festival of Extreme energy, Quantum Contradiction, and Sardonic Conservatism. This is the event that promises to leave us spent and scratching our mottled heads as to just What transpired. And like all good science, hopes to leave us with more questions than answers. The bill is ENORMOUS this year! Please come out and help support this rare opportunity to build and re-invent extreme underground community.

Here’s the full schedule and ticket information. For more news and discussion of this event, check out F-Space’s Tribe.net page.

UPDATE: here’s Jon Alloway’s photos

The long wait is over. The first issue of Hi Fructose, then new art & culture magazine by Attaboy and Annie Owens, has finally arrived! It features Kaiju Big Battel, Gary Baseman, Dave Cooper, Circus Punks, Friends With You, Jenny Bird, Alex Pardee, The Life Size Mouse Trap, Gobler Toys and Tom Koch’s Opera Daisy/Toybending and much more.

You can subscribe to Hi Fructose here or pick one up in person at any of these fine locations. Stay tuned for a Hi Fructose release party some time after Attaboy and Annie return from ComicCon.

Keep up with the latest Hi Fructose Magazine news and information on their new blog.

Back in March I mentioned the blog search engine Technorati, which had just hit the one billion mark of links tracked. Well Technorati has been coming along quite well in its evolution and they just launched their new website today (it was in beta for the last few weeks). The new design looks great and the features and functionality have improved quite a bit. To celebrate these changes, Technorati is having a party this Wednesday, June 22nd at The House of Shields in San Francisco. So come on out if you want to find out more about Technorati, what they have planned for the future, how they use tags or even if you want to pick up some of their cool new stickers (see above photo).

Speaking of tags, Technorati’s head engineer Kevin Marks and Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of the photo sharing website Flickr, recently launched Tag Tuesday, a monthly event where developers can get together to discuss the implementation of tags in various online resources and software. Here are my photos from the first Tag Tuesday which took place last week in San Francisco.

Photos from Dan & Karen’s Wedding Celebration

Tribe.net has just announced Tribe25 “People to Know in 2005” and I’m honored to be selected by the Tribe.net community as one of the 25. I’m in good company. Other Tribe25 people include Hal Robins, Will Franken, SFist kingpin Jackson West and Pirate Cat Radio’s own Monkey Man.

Tribe.net is all about connecting with other locals to discover the best of where you live. For 2005, tribe.net and its members have uncovered these interesting people who are a big part of what makes their world tick. And it’s tribe.net that gives them an easy, powerful, and customizable way to show the world what they’re all about.

If you are not familiar with Tribe.net, it’s a San Francisco based online social network, one of the better ones out there and I’ve been using it since September 2003. They just launched an excellent new modular, multi-themed templating system for their user profiles. I’m currently using this new system with my Tribe.net profile. It includes RSS support, so I now have feeds of the Laughing Squid blog, Squid List and my Flickr photostream loading into my Tribe.net page. If you don’t run an external blog, no problem, you can start your own using Tribe.net’s new blogging module. Another new feature is that member profiles will now have the ability to have custom url’s like people.tribe.net/scottbeale. Now you can instantly create your own website using Tribe.net with minimal effort. Kudos to Elliot, Gary and the rest of the Tribe.net design and development team.

To celebrate Tribe25, Tribe.net is throwing a party on Thursday, June 30th at 1015 Folsom in San Francisco starting at 7:30pm. Admission is free for Tribe.net members and it’s free to join Tribe.net. One of the performers at this event will be Laughing Squid favorite and fellow Tribe25′er Will Franken, who is without a doubt one of San Francisco’s most hilarious performers.