I recently came across my all-time favorite WordPress plugin, Flickr Photo Album. It pulls in all of your Flickr photos, galleries and photo information, using the Flickr API and comes with a fully customizable template and stylesheet. I now have full control over how my photos from Flickr are displayed on Laughing Squid. It’s the best of both worlds. The Flickr community can still access my photos as before and now regular visitors to Laughing Squid can view the photos within the context of the website and then decide if they want to go over to Flickr to comment, add notes, tag or favorite the photos.

For individual photos, you have your choice of a page with all the the photo info (including comments, tags, etc. if you want) or a really great javascript lightbox window that you can navigate through. The individual gallery pages include a link to the wonderful Flickr slideshow feature. After installing the plugin, it quickly gave me access to all 14,000+ of my photos (it uses a caching function).

Another fantastic feature of this plugin is that it adds a “photo” tab in the upload section of your WordPress editing screen. That gives you access all of your photos or even other people’s photos (searching by tag). Once you find the photo you want to include with your blog post, just click on it and you are presented with 5 size options. Choose the size you want and it will automatically add the correct code to your blog post at the cursor location. This blows away the WordPress photo upload feature or Flickr’s “Blog This” option.

The Flickr Photo Album plugin was created by Washington DC web developer Joe Tan for a client at his company Silas Partners. What’s really great is that even though if was for their client, they released it under the GPL as an open source plugin. Kudos to Joe for developing such a great plugin.

Matt, you should bake this into WordPress. Flickr, you guys should consider adding something like this on your end, maybe even developing similar plugins for Movable Type, Blogger, etc.

SomaFM recently launched their new “Doomed” channel just in time for Halloween. Here’s what’s in current rotation.

Dark and scary industrial-inspired music for tortured souls. Perfect for Halloween!

Oh hey if you listen to SomaFM, please consider donating to keep them on the air. At the $50 level you get one of their great SomaFM t-shirts. Once you receive your t-shirt, be sure to send them a photo of you wearing it for their online gallery (include your city, state and name, if you want it included with the listing).

via » Rusty Hodge & Boing Boing

Sonic juggernauts The Extra Action Marching Band are returning from an extended hiatus for their big “Scary Halloween Bash” tomorrow night (Tuesday, October 31st) at 12 Galaxies in San Francisco. Sour Mash Hug Band and Live Human open the show, followed by Extra Action Marching Band playing songs from Black Sabbath’s First Album.

The night will begin with the tasty jug love of The Sour Mash Hug Band, then it will dive deep into the unknown caverns of Live Human. At the arrival of the great pumpkin, Extra Action will summons the Flag Team from their coffins using the spirit of Black Sabbaths first Album. Just as you think there can’t be any more, Extra Action will explode into their normal Epicurean Hedonistic Bacchanalia.

We Are The Strange is a unique feature length animated film that mixes 8 bit video game culture and Anime. It was created by M dot Strange in his basement over a 3 year period, using personal computers, Cinema 4d, After Effects, Final Cut Pro 5, a green screen and a Canon 300D for the stop motion animation. The super talented artist David Choe created some art for the film and is the voice of “Rain”. It’s scheduled to be released in early 2007, but until then, check out the amazing trailer, it’s “Mega Hella Awesome”.

We are the Strange is an animated feature film in which two diametrically opposed outcasts fight for survival in a sinister fantasy world. After meeting in the somber Forest of Still Life, an abused young woman (Blue) reluctantly follows a care free dollboy (Emmm) to Stopmo City on his unreasonable quest for ice cream. They’re lives are constantly in jeopardy after they’re caught in the middle of a deadly battle between bizarre monsters on their way to the ice cream shop. A flamboyant ultraviolent hero(Rain) appears and effortlessly dispatches all the horrible monsters in his path. Blue meets Rain before he partakes in an impossible battle against the source of all that is evil in Stopmo City. When it seems as if darkness will have the last laugh a gleaming fist made of aluminum foil bursts through the ground thus starting the final showdown between mega_good and hyper_evil.

via » Dav Yaginuma

Chris Messina just posted great write-up on StrangeKiss, a new online store for art and toys that launched earlier this month. While browsing their website, I found things from my friends Attaboy and Alex Pardee, as well as a bunch of other great stuff. Mucho eye candy to be found on this website, including amazing artwork by David Lanham.

The main mission of Strangekiss is to bring “Art back into Art”. We strive for diversity and want to push limits of the Status Quo as a forever-growing and changing entity. Strangekiss should first and foremost be considered an online gallery more than a store, as that is the vibe we want to impart upon our visitors and growing list of private collectors.

In 1984 Stanley Kubrick put out a casting call for his film “Full Metal Jacket”. 20 year-old classically trained actor Brian Atene sent in this absurdly pompous video which was recently posted to YouTube.

Last week, a much older Brian Atene, came out of hiding after 23 years and posted a follow-up video, in response to the recent popularity of his original video (87K views on YouTube at the time of this posting).

Then, in an effort to beat this meme to a bloody pulp, the Ask A Ninja guys released a hilarious mashup of the original video.

UPDATE 1: The Internets are not convinced that the follow-up video was from the real Brian Atene and claim that it was just a parody. What do you think? Time to deploy the video facial recognition technology.

UPDATE 2: Both Kent Nichols and raincoaster point out that guy was a fake after all. The real Brian Atene has emerged with his own video.

The next SF Tech Sessions takes place this Monday, October 30th at the CNET offices in San Francisco. The topic this month is social bookmarking and the speakers include Larry Halff, founder of Ma.gnolia, David Galbraith the founder of Wists and Manish Chandra, CEO of Kaboodle. Niall Kennedy, the organizer of SF Tech Sessions recently did an excellent write-up on bookmarking and social sharing trends as a lead in to this month’s event.

UPDATE: Here are a few photos from the event.

A homeowner in Los Angeles, who is an aircraft mechanic in training, staged a fake plane crash in his front yard as a Halloween display. The installation includes parts from a real Gulfstream jet. Here’s more coverage of it from CBS 8, Yahoo! News and Reuters, as well as some video from YouTube.

Maybe The Art of Bleeding will use this idea for a follow-up to this year’s Halloween Highway theme.

via » Neatorama

Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito’s “Passage” sculpture on San Francisco’s Embarcadero at Pier 14 and been targeted by pranksters again. First there was the “bong & lighter prank” last month during Burning Man. Then last night or early this morning the smaller figure was covered with some kind of tarp, tied by a string. Nina Alter was down at the Farmer’s Market and came across the scene and and shot a few early morning photos. It appears that this is either just a half-assed Halloween costume or as Nina suggests an Abu Ghraib style prisoner. It’s not quite clear.

As with the previous modification, no one has yet claimed responsibility and it is not clear if the same person or people were involved this time around as well. It used to be that public acts of detournement were accompanied by a statement or even a press release, a tradition pioneered by the Billboard Liberation Front.

UPDATE: Violet Blue has also posted about this prank over at Metroblogging San Francisco.

Alan Ridenour has been producing his gory Art of Bleeding shows for over two years now and last night’s show broke the needle on the grisly meter. “The Art of Bleeding - Halloween Highway, A Cautionary Tableau of Automotive Carnage”, took place at The Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood and was a spoof of classic highway safety films. Chuck Cirino was on hand, capturing the eerie scene on video for Weird America. What a perfectly creepy way to start off the Halloween weekend.

For more Art of Bleeding fun, check out Chuck’s video of the “Abram and The Safety Bug” show from earlier this month, which features a guest appearance by the inimitable Margaret Cho.

So, I was looking at our Technorati account today and I noticed that we just broke the 1000 barrier, with a current ranking of 982. So according to Technorati, we are the 982nd ranked blog out of the 57 million blogs that Technorati tracks. Brian Pinkerton, Technorati’s director of search, recently did a great write-up on how Technorati counts blog links and calculates their ranking.

Of course a much more exclusive club, is the Technorati 100, which represents the top dogs of the blogosphere.

If you have a blog, then chances are that you are being tracked by Technorati. If you haven’t already, you should claim your blog, which will allow you to provide some additional information about your blog listing in Technorati’s search results. If your blog is not showing up in Technorati at all, you’ll need to make sure that you are properly pinging them.

Like FeedBurner’s FeedCount, the Technorati link count and ranking system is great for stats junkies like myself, providing additional motivation to continue posting interesting stuff, to keep existing readers, while gaining new ones.

Here are some photos from last Saturday at The Dark Room where Attaboy had his 2nd Annual YArt Sale. Oh hey and if you didn’t make it out, you can still buy some of Attaboy’s original drawings at the virtual YArt Sale.

Photos of Attaboy’s 2nd Annual YArt Sale

Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner and editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld hosted a Disruptors Roundtable yesterday at Hotel Vitale in San Francisco. It was a follow-up to Erick’s Disruptors cover story in Business 2.0 and many of those featured in the article were invited to this discussion, along with serveral of other people who are shaking things up in their respective industries. I was invited to take part as well and while there I shot a few photos of the event.

Photos from the Disruptors Roundtable

Every great launch, deserves a great party and Thursday night was no exception with Six Apart’s launch party for Vox at Bimbo’s 365 Club in North Beach.

Photos from the Vox Launch Party

Vox has just launched. It’s a new online community (blogs, photos, audio, video, books, etc.) run by Six Apart, the folks behind Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal. Unlike MySpace, Vox is actually well designed and is easy to navigate. The focus of Vox is more on a personal level, one to few vs. one to many. Six Apart founders Mena and Ben Trott explain “Why Vox?”.

In beta since June, they are already up to 85,000 active users and are off to a really great start.

Blogging is fun again. With privacy features that let you control who views each piece of your blog, you’ll never have to worry about who’s reading. With hundreds of beautiful designs, you can spend less time designing your site and more time with the people you care about. Better still, Vox gives you seamless access to the web services you already use — Amazon, YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, and more. The bottom line: Vox makes sharing your life with friends and family easy, entertaining, and safe.

I’ve been playing around with Vox a bit, there’s not a whole lot on our Vox page, but look us up if you are in the neighborhood. Of course we’re using Tiffany Chow’s awesome “Ocean Squid” theme.