Laughing Squid Circuit Board by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – photo by Scott Beale
Laughing Squid is an art, culture & technology blog and a hosting company specializing in Managed WordPress hosting. It was founded by Scott Beale in 1995 and is currently based in New York City.
For more info see our FAQ and Wikipedia aricle.
Laughing Squid is made up of two complementary entities, our blog and our hosting services:
Laughing Squid Blog
We’ve been running a blog since 2003, where we post about a variety of interesting things, including art, culture and technology. The Laughing Squid blog is run by founder Scott Beale, who is Publisher and Editor-In-Chief. Scott is joined by his wife, Contributing Editor Lori Dorn.
Laughing Squid Hosting
Since 1998 we have been providing reliable, scalable and secure hosting services to individuals, artists and bloggers, that currently focuses on WordPress hosting. Hosting is our primary source of revenue, aka the “business” side of Laughing Squid. If Laughing Squid were a mullet, hosting would be the short part in the front. The revenue generated from our hosting operations helps power the Laughing Squid blog.
The History of Laughing Squid
Laughing Squid was founded on November 16th, 1995 in San Francisco by Scott Beale as a film and video production company, producing documentaries on the surrealist painter Alonso Smith and The Cacophony Society’s Portland Santacon ’96 event. In 1996 Laughing Squid launched The Squid List, a San Francisco Bay Area events email list and calendar. Initially Laughing Squid offered publicity and web design services, but then focused on hosting in 1998 as its primary business. Laughing Squid became a LLC in 2000, with partners John Law and David Klass joining Scott Beale. In 2003 Laughing Squid launched its blog, which relaunched on WordPress in 2005. Laughing Squid moved its headquarters to New York City in 2010.
Here more on the history of the Laughing Squid name and the Laughing Squid Logo.
When Laughing Squid started out in San Francisco in 1995, it joined a vibrant local community, which includes events and organizations such as Burning Man, ArtCar Fest, Defenestration, Survival Research Labs, The Cacophony Society, SEEMEN, the extended universe of Chicken John, Power Tool Drag Races, Black Rock Arts Foundation, RoboGames, Santarchy (Santacon), Webzine, the original BarCamp, Maker Faire, dorkbot-sf, How to Destroy the Universe and Hi Fructose Magazine
Laughing Squid continues to keep close ties to many of these organizations.