Laughing Squid is a

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

featuring items of art, culture, and technology, as well as a

web hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing we ...

company based out of

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

, New York.

History

Laughing Squid was founded on November 16, 1995 in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

as a film and

video production Video production is the process of producing video content for video. It is the equivalent of filmmaking, but with video recorded either as analog signals on videotape, digitally in video tape or as computer files stored on optical discs, hard dri ...

company by Scott Beale, producing documentaries, including ''Alonso G. Smith, A Half Century of Social Surrealism'' about

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

surrealist painter Alonso Smith and ''You’d Better Watch Out: Portland Santacon ’96'' about the SantaCon event in

Portland, OR Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous coun ...

organized by the San Francisco Cacophony Society in 1996. In 1996, Laughing Squid launched The Squid List, a San Francisco Bay Area art and culture events calendar and email list that was decommissioned in 2013. In 1998, Laughing Squid launched a web hosting company Laughing Squid Hosting. In 2000, Laughing Squid became an LLC with

John Law John Law may refer to: Arts and entertainment * John Law (artist) (born 1958), American artist * John Law (comics), comic-book character created by Will Eisner * John Law (film director), Hong Kong film director * John Law (musician) (born 1961) ...

and David Klass joining as partners. The blog launched in 2003. Laughing Squid sponsored the back of

Frank Chu Frank Chu (born March 24, 1960) is an eccentric and conspiracy theorist from San Francisco. Since 1999 or earlier, Chu has been campaigning to impeach an array of former U.S. Presidents he considers guilty of collaborating with a nefarious netw ...

's sign from 2009 to 2013. In 2010, the company moved its headquarters to

, New York.

Philosophy and impact

Laughing Squid's main goal is to report, document, and inform the public about important events, projects and people in the field of art, technology and science. Gizmodo sees Laughing Squid as one of the 25 most viral media enterprises, commenting: "Scott Beale's events tracker the SquidList gave birth to his Laughing Squid web hosting business. Which gave birth to his weblog. Which gave birth to his Tumblr and Twitter—all of which breathed life into thousands of obscure stories that otherwise would have fallen soundlessly in digital forests. Today the smiling cephalopod is basically his own media empire". According to Quantcast, over 1.4 million people worldwide visit the site each month.

Team

The Laughing Squid blog is run by founder Scott Beale, who is Publisher and Editor-In-Chief. He is joined by Contributing Editor Lori Dorn.

Awards

* 2011

Webby Award The Webby Awards are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over two thousand industry experts and technology innovators. Categories includ ...

: Web (Blog - Cultural) - People's Voice

References

{{Reflist

External links

Laughing Squid blog

Laughing Squid web hosting service
American news websites Webby Award winners Mass media in San Francisco 1995 establishments in California