Mike and Justin are winging their way down to San Francisco (on wifi enabled Virgin America, no less!) for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center. Three days full of action, excitement, intrigue, and web operations, the highlight will surely be Friday afternoon’s talk from Mike and Justin themselves on “Inside Picnik:How we built Picnik and what we learned along the way.” That’s right, our very own COO and Penguin Handler shall dish the dirt on the wonders of Flash, our amazing growth, and everything you’ve ever wanted to know about CherryPy!

So keep an eye out for the guys from Picnik, and say hi when you see them!

Team Picnik is ever-so-proud of our very own Darrin Massena for winning the Technology Innovator of the Year award at Wednesday night’s WTIA Awards. He’s got a fancy vase on his desk now, and the rest of us have sparkly “Washington Technology Industry Association” swag bags full of tchotchkes. The award has set off a flurry of press coverage, including some thoughtful photographs of the cupcake tree those of us who couldn’t attend missed. And we’d like to thank John Cook (of the Puget Sound Business Journal’s Tech Flash blog) for sprinkling his Good Luck Curse-Breaking Fairy Dust for calling it too. It was very serendipitous of him!

Darrin, Jonathan, Mike, Steve, Sarah, and their better halves are on their way to the Historic Paramount Theatre tonight for the 2009 WTIA Industry Achievement Awards!

Of course, Picnik is up for Consumer Product of the Year, and our very own Darrin Massena has been nominated for Technology Innovator of the Year! We hope that all you Washingtonians in the Technology Industry out there can make it tonight. We’d love to meet you all, plus, there will be cocktails, networking, gaming lounges, and you’ll get to find out if Darrin wears a tux!

See Darrin in all his innovative glory!

Picnik’s SXSW team Peter (The Designer), Michael (The Other Designer), Mike (COO), and Jonathan (CEO) are thrilled to congratulate our friends at Flickr for winning in the Classic category at the 12th Annual South by Southwest Interactive Web Awards! As their partner photo editor, we’re proud to be part of their award-winning functionality, interactivity, and, of course, creativity!

Picnik’s SXSW team have been having a grand old time in Austin this weekend, and are looking forward to two more thrilling days of keynotes, panel discussions, and margaritas, buoyed by having been nominated in the same category as our friends at Flickr. All of us at Picnik want to thank all of you wonderful Picnikers who supported us, and we can’t wait till the guys get back to Seattle with all the learning, inspiration, and hangover cures they’ve picked up this week!

The sun was out, the app was up and running like a champ, the box office called out to us: it was the perfect day for a little R and R. I should have known better.

Last night you may have noticed a big ugly error page where Picnik should have been and a long list of trouble shooting suggestions that all led back to trouble. I wish I could say, “Well, you know the internet, such a fickle mistress,” or maybe I could have said that our tweet tipped off a gang of underground web 2.0 hackers, or even that the ninja cat sensed our retreat and attacked the servers in our absence. In fact, I’m almost tempted to craft an epic saga of renegade pixels joining forces with mutinous coding to rise up in rebellion and override Picnik, but it’s time to come clean:

I was looking at the wrong page in my calendar.

That’s really all it comes down to. I was looking at the wrong date, so I didn’t hit the renew button for our basic security certificate before grabbing my coat and heading out the door. To all those who suffered in the absence of Picnik, I am sorry. Picnik is back up and I’ll be double checking the dates in my agenda from now on.

Thanks for your patience, everyone!

Hi! I’m Lisa and I’m the newest member of the Picnik team. Part of being new is learning, learning, oh and then some more learning. So I would like your help with my learning curve!

I know what I would love to see us do next but I want to know what you all think. I want to better understand how and why you visit Picnik. What you love and what you would love for us to do. So I (together with some of the magic-makers here at Picnik) have pulled together a quick survey! Everything is confidential but your answers will help guide what we should work on next.

So thanks ahead of time for helping make Picnik even better (and for helping me learn)!

Take the Picnik Survey! And Happy Picnicking!

Monday, March 16 Update: After a week of incredibly overwhelming response, we’re closing the survey and letting ourselves catch up with all your responses and tens of thousands of comments! We’ve already gone through half of them, and we’re going to to read every single one of them! Thank you all again for being so generous with your time, and in such numbers. And now that we know what you all think, we can’t wait to decide what we’re going to do next!

Don’t forget! Picnik is up for a SXSW award and you can vote once a day, every day, through March 15! Just click this link, enter your secret password, and keep voting!

Remember, you can only vote for one company on that list, so choose wisely! Vote Picnik!

Update: Voting has closed! Thanks, everybody, for your support, and wish us luck in Austin this weekend!

The March contest theme has been announced by Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations and Antipodean Branch Office Manager, and this month it’s: Scrapbook!

Using any of Picnik’s tools and features, perhaps starting with collage and then adding stickers and text, or starting with a photo, adding a frame, and layering on top of it, and then adding stickers and text, you can enter up to 3 scrapbooked creations, and the winner wins a full year of Picnik Premium!

Also, congratulations to last month’s winners of the theme “Be Mine <3"! And a special congratulations to Wendy * Darling for tying herself for first place! She therefore wins not one but two years of Picnik Premium! I’m sure she’s very popular this week…

Runners-up [[TiGER.} and brownie.bacon both win free 3-month subscriptions for their submissions as well! A slideshow of all last month’s entries can be seen here.