It is our pleasure to announce that Laughing Squid has reached a milestone today, this is our 15,000th post! It was only a little over a year ago when we hit our 10,000th post mark.

Amazingly, Laughing Squid founder and editor-in-chief Scott Beale is responsible for over 10,000 of those posts which started with this first post in 2003. To give you some perspective, I alone have written 1528 blog posts since I began in May 2011 and our Sr. Contributing Editor EDW Lynch has written 1821 posts since February 2011.

For kicks, EDW, mikl-em and I each chose a memorable post to date:

Rusty Blazenhoff, Managing Editor:
1960s Narcotics & Dangerous Drugs Identification Kit

This vintage drug kit is something in my personal collection, it’s something I look at in my house every single day and it was not found online before I posted it. When I first started blogging for Laughing Squid, I thought it might be an interesting item for the world to see and sure enough, it was.

EDW Lynch, Sr. Contributing Editor:
Grand Rapids Shows Civic Pride With World’s Largest Lip Dub Video

I loved this 2011 community art project from Grand Rapids, Michigan. After Newsweek called the city one of “America’s Dying Cities,” Rob Bliss and 5000 fellow residents created a spirited and moving lip dub music video of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

mikl-em, Contributing Editor-at-Large:
Vintage Narragansett Beer Commercials Featuring Mike Nichols and Elaine May

As a comedy performer and social drinking enthusiast myself, plus a total geek on the history of the things that I love, I was thrilled to discover these clips on YouTube. Mike Nichols and Elaine May are absolute comic geniuses and founders of an improvising tradition that led directly to Second City, Saturday Night Live, and eventually Arrested Development, Borat, and The Office. The animations are great, very Rocky & Bullwinkle-esque, and there’s a Dr. Seuss connection which I discovered while researching it. I love writing about obscure things that deserve celebration and giving them context to hopefully be better appreciated. And plus, you know, BEER!

We would like to give a big shout out to our awesome network of guest bloggers and editors who have posted interesting content on the blog over the years. You can learn more about Laughing Squid on our “What is Laughing Squid?” page.

photo by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid art by Loid Mongoloid

I haven’t looked at the Technorati Top 100 list a while, but we are now at #29 on the list. I noticed this when reading a recent Pingdom blog post about how WordPress is now completely dominating the top 100 blogs.

Back in 2006 we entered the top 1000 blogs then in 2007 we joined the top 500 blogs.

Speaking of WordPress, Laughing Squid has been happily running WordPress since we launched in 2005.

Facebook has just launched Timeline for Facebook pages (regular uses have had it for a while). Currently pages have an option to preview Timeline until March 20, 2012, when Timeline will be implemented on all pages.

Inside Facebook has posted a really good overview of the new features on Timeline for Facebook.

We just turned on Timeline for the Laughing Squid page on Facebook, check it out.

Dan’l Linehan of Archie Mcphee has created this awesome image of himself as the Laughing Squid logo using Cthulhu Tentacles and some digital magic. Thanks Dan’l!

Also, here he is as Cthulhu:

images via Archie McPhee

Special thanks to David Wahl!

So some of you may not realize this, but Laughing Squid also offers cloud-based web hosting services via Laughing Squid Web Hosting. We’ve been hosting websites since 1998 and the revenue generated from our web hosting services helps support this blog and our other projects. One of our main focuses is hosting WordPress blogs, in fact we are one of the web hosting companies officially recommended by WordPress. So if you are looking for a web host, check us out!

So you may not be aware of this, but you can receive Laughing Squid blog updates via email.

The original option which we have add for years is to subscribe via FeedBurner which sends a daily digest of posts.

We just added a second option were you can subscribe via WordPress using their Jetpack service (look for the subscribe option on our sidebar). Once you sign up you’ll be able to select either a weekly digest of posts or an email update for each individual post. The WordPress subscription also has options for delivery window settings.

For some unknown reason, both options do not properly display embedded videos.

Nearly two thirds of our visitors are from the United States. Rounding out the top five countries: Canada (6.5%), United Kingdom (6.3%), Australia (2.3%), and Germany (1.7%). We had one visitor from the Falkland Islands.

Of our American visitors, 20% are from California, followed by 9% from New York and 6% from Texas.

As far as cities, our two biggest (worldwide) are New York City and San Francisco. They are neck in neck: New York is leading slightly with just over 5% of our American readers, San Francisco is at 4.9%. Rounding out the top five cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, and London.

When it comes to technology, most of our readers are running Windows OS (58%), followed by Mac OS (27%) and iOS (9%). They’re mostly on Firefox (34%) and Chrome (30%) browsers, with Safari (15%) and Internet Explorer (12%) trailing a bit behind. Of our mobile users 27.5% are using iPhones and nearly half are running iOS devices of some kind.

So there you have it: our 2011 Laughing Squid readers in numbers and maps.

StumbleUpon recently released a completely redesigned version of their website, which includes new Channels for sites, brands and people. Here’s the new Laughing Squid Channel on StumbleUpon.

We’ve completely redesigned the experience, including a revamped site design, new logo, streamlined StumbleBar and even more ways to explore with the addition of Channels and a deeper integration of the Explore Box.

Today is the 16th anniversary of Laughing Squid. On November 16th, 1995 I created a film and video production company in San Francisco while working on my documentary about the social surrealist artist Alonso Smith. Then in 1996 I setup The Squid List, followed by the debut of our web hosting operations in 1998 and starting in 2005 I formally launched this blog on WordPress. And for those of you wondering, here’s the origin of the name “Laughing Squid”.

Tonight’s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show opened with Rachel talking about Laughing Squid and my recent blog post about Moustair, the Tumblr blog with the strange collection of photos featuring men’s moustaches as their own hair.

Our beloved Doggie Diner Dog Heads make a cameo as well.

via Emma Welles

Yesterday Google launched their new Google+ pages for companies and brands.

Here are our new Google+ pages for Laughing Squid and Laughing Squid Web Hosting.

Along with this blog, here are a few other places to find Laughing Squid on the Interwebs:

Twitter – This is were we send short blasts from our blog and elsewhere.

Tumblr – This is our link blog, which often includes the stuff that doesn’t make it on the main blog.

Facebook – We cross-post our stuff here for people to comment on and share.

Google+ – The new kid on the block, lots of activity here on our posts, plus some links not on the main blog.

Flickr – This is where we post our photos, over 40,000 of them are up there so far.

YouTube – This is where we post the videos we occasionally shoot.

Kickstarter – Our page of Kickstarter projects that we find interesting.

Foursquare – Places we check into where you might run into us.

VHX – An endless stream of interesting videos we discover.

photo by Dan Benjamin

photo by Scott Beale

On Sunday, October 16 I’ll be interviewing long-time counter-cultural instigator and organizer John Law about making culture & cacophony live onstage at East Bay Mini Maker Faire. John is also a partner in Laughing Squid, serving as “Head of Special Projects”. The event takes place at Park Day School in Oakland, California. Tickets are now available.

We’ve written about East Bay Mini Maker Faire earlier–the lineup is pretty incredible. Here’s the description of our talk:

11AM — How to Start your Own Cultural Revolution:
Laughing Squid’s Mikl-Em interviews John Law, co-founder of Burning Man and a long-time member of such counter culture institutions as The Suicide Club, The Cacophony Society, and Survival Research Labs. John will discuss climbing bridges, hunting robot cars, giant dog heads, cheap Santa suits, what the Moonies and Old Navy have in common, and making your own culture at home and in the streets.

There’s a lot to talk about. John Law arrived in San Francisco in 1976, saw a giant cartoon dachshund head hocking hamburgers, and went immediately down the rabbit hole. In the 35 years since he has done incredible and ridiculous things: climbing bridges and writing about it, helping start a festival in the desert and later suing the festival, driving fast food mascots cross-country and making a film about it, and a lot more stuff his lawyer won’t let him discuss.

I like this writeup by another long-time troublemaker Stuart Mangrum:

Like most of John Law’s events, it began with cryptic instructions: “We will be leaving from the Vaillancourt Fountain in Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco at 7:01 pm sharp. Look for the man in the Top Hat. Bring legal ID, $2.75 in quarters, and a flashlight.” There was no indication of what we would be doing, other than the event name, ‘COVERT,” and John’s rich history of hosting off-the-grid excursions.

photo by mikl-em

Each May since 2006 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds the Make Magazine folks produce Maker Faire featuring hundreds of DIY makers showing their stuff from tesla coils to tarot decks for tens of thousands of visitors. They’ve done similar large scale Maker Faires in Austin, New York & Detroit as well. But there’s also a series of independently-organized events called “Mini Maker Faires” at dozens of locations across the US & Canada from Fort Wayne to Phoenix to Atlanta.

The “Mini” events are smaller in scale–for Sunday they expect a few thousand visitors and will have 130 makers on hand–but just as diverse in content including robots, bees, Arduinos, art cars, free radio, and a whole lot more projects from motivated makers who want to share their enthusiasm and experiences. They are family-friendly and nerd-tastic.

Kevin Rose wore a Laughing Squid t-shirt the latest episode of Diggnation (thanks Kevin!), where Kevin and Alex Albrecht talk about how Diggnation will be ending soon. The final episode will be recorded on December 30th, 2011 in Los Angeles.

This is my 10,000th post on Laughing Squid. Back in April we hit 10,000 total blog posts (we are now at 12,225).

My first post on Laughing Squid, which launched the blog, was on February 27th, 2003 for a benefit that Survival Research Labs was organizing for our friend Tim North at SOMArts in San Francisco.

Thanks for all the support through the years, we never would have made this far without awesome readers like you!

When I founded Laughing Squid in November 1995 the first step was coming up with a unique name. That was hard enough, but trying to come up with a good squid themed logo is next to impossible. Squid are not logo shaped and artists often have a difficult time representing all 10 tentacles. Here’s how our logo has evolved over the years.

Early on I created this canned squid logo by scanning an actual can of “California Squid” a friend had given me, replacing the word “California” with “Laughing” (my first real attempt at Photoshop). It was on our splash page (.com) which used to separate the content (.org) and web hosting (.net) sides of Laughing Squid.

In 1999 I commissioned the San Francisco graphic design company Dichotomy to create a business-like logo for us to use for our newly launched web hosting services.

In 1999 I commissioned my friend, San Francisco artist and perfomer Hal Robins to create our first real logo. Hal, who has a background in comics, made this light-hearted logo of a squid wearing glasses that was literally laughing.

Hal’s logo was used on our first ever Laughing Squid t-shirt, seen here being modeled by Louis Brill.

In 2000 I commissioned my friend Attaboy (co-founder of Hi-Fructose) to create a logo that we used for a while.

Then in 2000 we had a defining moment in our history. Matt Dong, one of the subscribers to our San Francisco Bay Area events list The Squid List, created an amazing logo that he gifted to us as a thanks for providing the services of the list to the community. As soon as I saw it I knew that it was the perfect logo for us.

I asked Matt if we could use his design as our main logo and he allowed us to, never once charging us anything for his design services. He even re-designed the logo, creating the familiar, less stylized 3 color version.

From there we eventually switched the type to VAG Rounded, creating the recognizable logo that we have used eveywhere for the last 11 years, including on our websites, t-shirts, stickers and mugs.

We are eternally grateful to Matt and the wonderful gift he gave us. It has served us well.

Before there was a Laughing Squid website and blog, there was The Squid List, our San Francisco Bay Area events list that I started in 1996. For many of you Bay Area “old timers”, The Squid List is probably how you first found out about Laughing Squid.

Before I created a formal email list, I used to cross-post events to the Burning Man mailing list run by Eric Pouyoul on Chorus.com. The first Squid List event that I ever posted was on September 23, 1996 for the Playa Dust Lounge, the very first public Burning Man decompression event, which I organized along with Danielle Engelman and a crew of amazing volunteers.

As the Burning Man list grew in size, many of my friends started unsubscribing from it and so I stopped cross-posting events to the Burning Man list all together and created an informal BCC list using the emails of around 100 of my closest friends. In the beginning the events I posted to list were related various creative projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Burning Man, The Cacophony Society, Defenestration and others, as well as events organized by Chicken John. The BCC list was sent out under the name Alpha Squids List. I was reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at time and this was our little A-List for the Alphas.

The list kept evolving organically and eventually, people referred friends of friends and so on. By 1997 BBC list became too big, os I setup an actual mailing list using majordomo hosted at the long-gone Sirius.com (back when that domain belonged to an independent San Francisco ISP, not a satellite radio service).

In October 1998 I ran into to my friend Brian Behlendorf (Apache Software Foundation, Organic, HotWired & CollabNet) at a Survival Research Labs demonstration (in conjunction with the Web 98 conference) at the corner of Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. Brian generously offered to host both The Squid List and the Laughing Squid website on Hyperreal, his infamous server that was home to SF Raves, burningman.com (at the time) and many other great community-based websites. When we migrated the Squid List to Hyperreal, we began using the ezmlm mailing list program for the list.

Over time people started referring to the list as just “The Squid List”, so eventually that became the official name.

We launched our web hosting services in late 1998, but still continued to host the list on Hyperreal through 2000, but then eventually moved the Squid List in-house. Soon after we migrated to the mailman email list program.

In 2003 we finally decided to post all the Squid List events on an online calendar, in addition to the mailing list, using a script developed by John McDonnell, who was our sys admin at the time.

In 2006 we gave The Squid List an complete redesign, migrating the online calendar to the Helios Calendar script and the email list to FeedBurner. This is how it still configured today.

In 2008 we brought on our friend Simone Davalos to administer The Squid List and she’s been doing an awesome job keeping the events flowing these last few years. She also maintains The Squid List account on Twitter.

In 2009 The Squid List moved to its own domain: squidlist.com

While The Squid List is no longer a major component of Laughing Squid like it once was, it still has a loyal following in the San Francisco Bay Area where many people still use it daily to find out about interesting events.

The answer to that question is not simple, but here goes…

In 1995 I was working on my first documentary Alonso G. Smith, A Half Century of Social Surrealism, which was about the San Francisco Bay Area surrealist Alonso G. Smith. I wanted to create a film production company to release and distribute the documentary and this company needed a name. I didn’t want to go with obvious choices that included my name or even a reference to film and video.

I needed something unique. Something that people would remember.

While flying back to San Francisco on a cross-country flight in the Fall of 1995 I made it my goal to come up with a name before the plane landed. By the end of the flight Laughing Squid ended up at the top of the list.

When I founded the company in November 1995, the full name was originally Laughing Squid Productions, but the “Productions” was latter dropped to simplify things.

So why squid? Well I had been fascinated squid for a long time. When I first met my friend David Klass during our junior year of high school, I came across the 1973 Jaques Cousteau book Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence in his bedroom. From that point on squid was a recurring theme with us. A friend’s band had a demo recording that I named “March of the Blue Squid” and later on when I started going online, my first username was squidink and so on.

And then in 1992, just a few years before I started the company, one of my favorite bands They Might Be Giants came out with their album Apollo 18 which featured an illustration of a giant squid battling a sperm whale as the album art, yet one more thing influencing the choice of squid in the name.

The idea of squid worked well as part of the name since the multiple tentacles would be a metaphor for all of the various things I wanted to do with the company. From the very beginning I knew we would be involved in way more areas than just film and video production, which was the case as we expanded into local art promotion with the launch of The Squid List, then web design, which led to web hosting and then finally the blog which you are now reading.

And having the squid laugh was an absurd concept. There has always been some kind of humor element involved with things I’ve been involved with. Even the Alonso Smith documentary was about a satirical surrealist who used humor throughout his work.

A final factor was that I always loved the name Barking Pumpkin Records, which was the record label started by Frank Zappa. He was a big influence, so in a way Laughing Squid is also tribute to his inspiration through creativity and humor.

So there you have it, that’s basically how the name “Laughing Squid” came into existance.

photos by Scott Beale & Ron Kane

After the attacks of 9/11 we learned that one of our web hosting customers, Mark Bingham, founder of PR company the The Bingham Group, had died aboard United Airlines Flight 93 that went down in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Mark was one of the flight’s heroes who attempted to storm the cockpit and helped divert the course of the flight. In his honor, we posted a tribute to Mark at the top of our web hosting website which remained their through the end of 2001.

The Mark Bingham Foundation, a nonprofit organization setup in honor of Mark and his heroic efforts aboard Flight 93, continues to promote the causes he supported.

September 2001 screenshot via Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Matthew Haggett, who makes wonderful Twitter ASCII art, recently created this awesome version of the Laughing Squid logo as unicode art that he posted on Google+. Last year he posted an ASCII version of our logo on Twitter.

Laughing Squid has been nominated for two awards in the SF Weekly Web Awards 2011. We are up for the Best Arts Blog and Best Events Website. Voting is open through August 30th and the winners will be announced on September 2, with an Web Awards Party on September 9 at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco.

We are honored to be nominated along with so many awesome websites and people, including many of our friends.

You can vote for Laughing Squid through the SF Weekly Web Awards 2001 poll page.

Content from Laughing Squid is being featured on Flipboard. You can find us under the “Cool Curators” section.

We are excited to announce that our Laughing Squid link blog on Tumblr has joined The Deck ad network along with our main Laughing Squid blog, which joined in March 2010. We are honored to be among such a wonderful group of websites and blogs and our experience with The Deck over the last 16 months has been amazing.

So now you can advertise on the entire Laughing Squid network by signing up for a campaign on The Deck.

The Deck is run by our friends at Coudal Partners based out of Chicago who are the awesome folks behind such wonders as the Museum of Online Museums, Layer Tennis and Field Notes. What we love about The Deck vs. other traditional online ad networks is that only one small, high quality, unobtrusive ad is displayed in rotation on our blogs’ sidebar. Also many of the companies that advertise on The Deck are actually products and services that we would be actually be interested in using, so it’s a really great fit for us.

Laughing Squid guest blogger and illustrator Hugh D’Andrade recently found a Thai restaurant in Brighton, England with a somewhat familiar name: Giggling Squid.

I was in Brighton, UK and came across this restaurant which reminded me of my favorite blog!

photos by Hugh D’Andrade

It’s so great having her on board the squid ship.

And now, I turn you over to Rusty…

– Scott Beale

Howdy Squid-lovin’ readers,

For the time I have been contributing posts to Laughing Squid thus far, I have to say, it’s been a tremendous amount of fun. As requested and to give you some background on how I arrived here, I present this short personal history.

As the former Communications Specialist for the now defunct Bigrig Industries, a satirical organization that issued paper zines, I have long embraced the activities of the San Francisco Bay Area underground events scene. A true prankster at heart, I was also a proud member of the San Francisco Cacophony Society for many years and around that same time I was a graphic designer for Burning Man.

At this amazing moment in time, I own and operate Rusty’s Real Deal, an estate liquidation company serving California’s East Bay area. My life-long passion for all things mysterious and thrifty has led me to pursue this natural calling, and – along with the Real Deal’s sister endeavor, Moxie Deluxe – I continue to dedicate my life to showcasing and celebrating all things beautiful and absurd.

It is truly an honor to post right along side some of the most beautiful and absurd people that I know. My tentacle ‘guns’ are a-blazing and I am really looking forward to showing off the skills I learned in Laughing Squid Blogging Boot Camp.

xo,

Rusty.

photos by Lane Hartwell, Scott Beale and Bigrig Industries

archival scans by Ken Dashner

sage advice and writing assistance by DaisyPup and Veek Toastia