photo via Spots Unknown

Our friend Jeff Diehl, who’s worked on The RU Sirius Show, 10 Zen Monkeys and GettingIt.com, recently launched Spots Unknown, a wonderful new blog focused on “Exploring & infiltrating the forgotten places, events, and histories of San Francisco”.

This site aims to explore and infiltrate histories forgotten and places unfound in the greatest American city. Those who live in San Francisco know that it has a rich history, from the original Ohlone inhabitants, to the Gold Rush, to the quake of ‘06, and into the modern era.

It is a small city, a dense collection of hills and neighborhoods, parks and populations. It’s a challenge, even for those of us who’ve lived here a decade or more, to fully expose ourselves to it. There are spots that remain hidden, and even the spots that we’ve seen and experienced are often not fully known.

Jeff’s been posting a bunch of great unique San Francisco content, including interesting locations in the city that he’s been listing on the Spots Map.

Spots Unknown is hosted our cloud service and we’re exited to have them aboard.

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Plug1 of the San Francisco photo blog WHAT IM SEEING has just outed himself as Troy Holden and has joined forces with Brad Evans, Stuart Dixon and Julie Michelle to launch the new group photo blog Caliber. Congratulations guys, it looks great!

Our subject matter will focus on The City and its surrounding cities, with the occasional trek across state and international borders.

I should also mention that we are honored to be hosting Caliber on our cloud service.

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BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2009 is a conference, tradeshow and media event for all new media that takes place October 15-17 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

This is first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of new media including: Blogging, Podcasting, Social Media, Online Video, Music, TV, Radio, Gaming, Entertainment and Communities.

Laughing Squid is a media partner of this year’s event.

The conference organizers are offering Laughing Squid readers a 20% discount on the event. Just enter SQUID20 when you register for the conference, this includes the early registration discount if you sign-up before September 14th.

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Our friends at Archie McPhee have lust launched a new blog, Monkey Goggles.

As part of Archie McPhee, we will maintain the high ideals and point of view of that organization. Our purpose is to present the world as we see it and ignore the things we find boring. There will be no pop singing sensations gone bad or reviews of albums you don’t care about, we write about the parts of the world that society forgot or does not have the nerve to ponder.

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As It Ought To Be is a new progressive blog founded by Matt Gonzalez, who was a former San Francisco Supervisor, Green Party candidate for San Francisco Mayor in 2003 and Ralph Nader’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election.

This is a progressive blog which hopes to encourage thought and action related to contemporary political and cultural matters. It takes its name from the quotation below by Thomas Paine. The writers do not belong to a particular political party, nor are they expected to adhere to any set program. They all value progressive democratic principles and have a healthy skepticism for the lesser of two evils and unnecessary compromise.

via RE/Search Publications

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Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg just wrote a new book “Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters”, about the history of blogging and its impact on society.

In Say Everything, Scott Rosenberg chronicles blogging’s unplanned rise and improbable triumph, tracing its impact on politics, business, the media, and our personal lives. He offers close-ups of innovators such as Blogger founder Evan Williams, investigative journalist Josh Marshall, exhibitionist diarist Justin Hall, software visionary Dave Winer, “mommyblogger” Heather Armstrong, and many others.

As part of the research for his book, Scott made a video where he attempts to find out Who Was The First Blogger?.

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Melody is a new open source content management and blogging platform based on Movable Type. Here’s more on the launch from Byrne Reese and Ben Trott.

Melody is an open source content management and publishing system derived from the popular blogging tool Movable Type. Melody is for those who find value in belonging to, supporting and contributing to a community of helpful, passionate and devoted users, but it is also for people who want a secure, proven and high quality publishing environment for their personal web site or their business.

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Throwing devil horns in your general direction.

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guest post by Burstein!

photo by Inhae Lee

My Milk Toof is a photo blog where each post tells a story over 1 to 10 images of two Milk Toofs that happen to reside at Inhae Lee’s home.

When I was young, I placed my baby teeth under my pillow and when i woke up I’d find a shiny new quarter. But whatever happened to those little teeth? Where did they go? Would I ever see them again?

Many years later, a little tooth was standing at my door. It looked familiar. It’s name was ickle. Welcome home, my milk toof!

The stories are exceedingly cute, simple and elegantly illustrated through the photos. As one commenter noted, “it’s like a ticklish photo haiku.”

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guest post by Burstein!

You know what they say– the family that caters together stays together.

In a model analogous to Look At This Fucking Hipster, Awkward Family Photos is a nifty little blog of, well, awkward family photos an snarky commentary. There is something inherently uncomfortable looking at these photos, at least for me, because some either bring up specific knowledge of photos of my family… or at least evoke the “there I go but for the grace of God” sentiment.

Ok, maybe not there I go but… you know what i meant. Still, there is something charming about the Awkwardian Era, Awklord of the Rings, and even that infamous godawful Christmas photo. The appeal lies in the naked exposure of each of us in our dorky glory when we are not trying to be anything beyond being happy with our family.

via Lee LeFever on Twitter

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guest post by Burstein!

Once we can find protection for it in the form of a case made entirely of Tyrannosaurus bone and the feathers of the Dodo bird, this phone will be ready for regular usage.

Maybe You Shouldn’t Buy That is a nifty little blog that showcases the worlds most expensive and useless items. Beyond the posting of the items itself, the snarky commentary is *ahem* priceless.

Not feeling like a precious-enough metal? Get your face full of gold with this $105 gold mask treatment. Sure it’s probably not going to do anything, but your husband isn’t going to live out his fantasies of getting blown by C-3PO any other way, now is he?

via Stumble Upon

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photo by Rick Abruzzo

Recently you may have noticed quite a few posts on this blog by that Burstein! guy.

Who is this you ask?

Michael D. Burstein (a.k.a. Burstein) is an old friend of mine who is a prankster, artist and social justice research junky that graduated from U.C. Berkeley School of Law in 2006 and has since worked in Bosnia, Cambodia and San Francisco on human rights law and policy. He started off as a guest blogger is now doing daily posts for us as a contributing writer. I still maintain full editorial control of everything that gets posted to the blog, but at this point I just don’t have the time to write about the volume of stuff that I feel should be featured. This is where Burstein comes in and he’s doing a bang up job.

Mike is currently between gigs while writing for us and is looking for full-time work related legal or policy advocacy and research. If you have any job leads for him, let us know.

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We’ve recently created a Laughing Squid Blidget through Widgetbox to distribute the content of our blog, Twitter updates and Flickr photos. A Blidget is a widget that is optimized for blog content. Here’s our Laughing Squid Blidget which you can embed on your own website or blog.

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Recently I’ve added a Retweet button to our blog posts. It’s a service of Tweetmeme a website that tracks popular links on Twitter. It’s been a really good indicator for which posts are popular as well as making it easier for readers to share them on Twitter. All you do is click the button and it will compose a Twitter post with the title and link of the blog post (the link will be automatically shortened by bit.ly).

It’s super easy to add to your blog, just one line of JavaScript, no account sign-up needed.

Andrew Mager wrote about the Tweetmeme’s Retweet button last week on The Web Life and I agree with him that links shared on Twitter spread much quickly than they do on Digg, maybe Digg will implement something like this on their end.

UPDATE: Tweetmeme has removed the whitelist restriction from their Retweet button, so now you can customize it to display your Twitter @username.

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guest post by mikl-em

Okay, this a straight up response to the CSS IS AWESOME ‘mug shot’ posted earlier.

I was reminded of the above awesome shirt that was posted as an idea on the Ironic Sans blog (there are a lot of other great and funny ideas on the site).

Then I took a little survey of funny-type shirts online, here are some of the best:

Love both of these. Sold via Wire and Twine and designed by Subtraction.

Here are a few wry type-slinger wares from Veer…

Lots more typographysterical shirts on Veer.com, I can’t fit them all here.

I am so not going to comment on this Zazzle t-shirt by Glorious SOBs.

From the MyFonts blog.

And then there’s the mighty Helbotica…

Helbotica from Chop Shop features on the list of 10 Shirts Every Type Nerd Must Own courtesy of thedesigncubicle.com along with 8 shirts not shown here (and one that is). I urge you to check ‘em out.

By the way, I am very not a type nerd myself. I’ve just known quite a few over the years. And I enjoy studying the humor of bizarre subcultures.

Yes, the joke font springs eternal. *ducks*

images via Ironic Sans, Subtraction, Veer, Glorious SOBs, MyFonts Blog & Chop Shop

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Freelance writer Dave Stratton updates his blog Deadpan Inc. in the form of daily dialog-driven animation. His most recent blog post is about creative mortuary science.

via Cartoon Brew

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guest post by Aaron Muszalski

If FAIL Blog had a Futura and coke-fueled fling with Wes Anderson cosplayers in the back of the Beauty Bar, its lovechild might grow up to look something like Tenenbaum FAIL. A series of photos offered without commentary (other than the ubiquitous, requisite “FAIL”) it’s hard to tell whether the anonymous editor’s intent is mockery or celebration. Or perhaps both. “mockebration” anyone?

via Schlomo Rabinowitz

images via Tenenbaum FAIL

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guest post by Simone Davalos

The National Museum of Health and Medicine (otherwise known as the Army Medical Museum) has a gorgeous Flickr stream filled with enough medical curiosities, technologies, and well-documented photographs to keep the most prurient of medical anomaly junkies awake at their keyboards late into the night.

Says Mike Rhode, comics researcher and contributor to the Museum’s blog, the delightfully named “A Repository for Bottled Monsters“:

I think I come off as a bit strident there, but we are creating a massive new resource and need to make it available in new ways. Most of these photographs were never described in any database (although there is a set of index cards that fills a wall) and we’re discovering and seeing them for the first time too.

Such is the beauty of wide open informational networks. Unfortunately the Army seems to disagree, as they have blocked the museum’s Flickr access. The maintainers of the archive are not to be thwarted, however; they are uploading pics from home!

Thanks to Nina Eleanor Alter for the link!

image via Museum of Health & Medicine

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At 12:01pm EST Whitehouse.gov relaunched as Barack Obama was being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on the steps of the The Capitol in Washington DC.

Along with the relaunch comes a new design and White House blog, complete with several RSS feeds. It looks great and is exciting to have a presidential administration that embraces technology.

Hopefully we will see more activity on Obama’s Twitter account as well.

UPDATE: The White House is on Twitter, that’s probably where we will be seeing the majority of updates related to Obama’s presidency.

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On Friday Tumblr launched the 5th generation of the Tumblr dashboard.

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