I want to talk about the last thing I thought I’d ever want to talk about: Star Trek.

This is coming from someone who only, on Friday last week, AFTER seeing the new Star Trek movie on IMAX with Team Picnik, found out that it was a young William Shatner who played the original Captain Kirk. So you can tell that up until now I’ve managed to avoid all things Trek.

And yet I’ll be the first to admit that I totally loved the movie! I even walked away with a newfound crush on Spock (there’s just something about that inner struggle between logic (vulcan) and emotion (human) that gets me every time).

Star Trek is totally funny, slightly campy and 100% adventurous. It also delivers an important and (unfortunately) underused message. Oftentimes blockbusters like this are more singular in their nature, adhering to the all too familiar “hero’s journey”. The timeless story which revolves around one main character, who (with the help of a few quirky friends) is able to: self-actualize, win the girl and save the world.

Star Trek is different.

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Team Picnik had a great night at the Seattle 2.0 Awards last night and it was all thanks to all you Picnikers out there!

We were nominated for four awards: Best Startup Product Designer (Peter Roman), Best Startup CEO (Jonathan Sposato), Best Boot-Strapped Startup and Best Startup (as in, the best startup in Seattle) and we won every one of them! We’re so excited!

The event was great too: held at the Pacific Science Center next to the Space Needle, it was really expertly put together by Marcello Calbucci and he deserves a lot of congratulations for organizing such a fun evening. As Marcello pointed out in his speech last night, the Seattle 2.0 Awards are important because Seattle especially is such a wonderful place for startups with a vibrant tech community, active investor base, and booming with ideas and entrepreneurial spirit. The technology and startup industry in Seattle is a special, dynamic place, and it’s because of that that this Seattle-specific award means so much to us.

But we couldn’t have done it without all our loyal Picnikers! You read our Facebook updates, our Twitter tweets, and blog posts, and you clicked that badge on the Welcome page and because of your enthusiasm and all your votes we won! And we can’t thank you enough for giving us such a fun night. So thank you.

Saturday, May 2, is National Scrapbooking Day. For you expressive souls who need more than what a drafting table, cutting board, soldering iron, 14 pair of specialty scissors, a compartmented box full of die-cut letters, flowers, leaves, hearts, teddy bears and kittens, glue and buttons can offer, allow us to offer a way to augment your craft: Picnik!

Just about everything on Picnik can be used towards digital scrapbooking greatness. The internet is full of handy free patterns and textures to use as new papers to layer with, and why limit yourself to your box full of die-cut shapes when there’s our huge collection of Stickers? We’ve got tons of fonts to put your memories into words, and for an extra head start there are all our collections of Fancy Collages, organized by theme. There are oodles of things on Picnik that even we haven’t tried yet, and National Scrapbooking Day is a great time for trying something new! And with our easy integrations on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and all sorts of other photo sharing and social networking sites, it can be like attending a scrapbooking party on National Scrapbooking Day, as well!

For inspiration, our own Brenda Anderson, Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, in had a Scrapbooking contest on the Flickr Picnikers group for the month of March, and to help celebrate all the possibilities of this craftiest of holidays, our friends at Blisstree are having a National Scrapbooking Day Giveaway: two free year-long Picnik Premium subscriptions, just for suggesting to her (and us) some clever feature ideas.

The Webware 100 polls close on Thursday so there are just two little days left to register your vote for Picnik as the best Photo & Video site out there! The winners will be announced on the 19th of May, and until then we’re all on the edges of our seats, but in the meantime, take that uncertainty head on and vote Picnik! Then wish us luck!

Our other big contest, the Seattle 2.0 Awards, are closing their polls today, and the winners will be announced next Thursday at the Pacific Science Center in the shadow of the Space Needle. We’ll keep you posted!

Last week Brian, our Quixotic Softographer, told his incredibly pregnant wife about our latest additions of Stickers and Fancy Collages, and said that it was therefore safe for her to have their baby, because they were all set up for the announcements.

That’s right, for Picnik Premium members, we have two whole sets of Baby Fancy Collages! One for baby boys, and one for baby girls! Each set has a dozen adorable and tastefully laid out spaces for either single or up to three photographs of your little bundle (or bundles!) of joy. Plus, for the Customization-enthusiasts amongst you, or those who prefer to put together their own adorably-adorned baby photos, there are thirty cute and cuddly baby-themed shapes in the Stickers list.

And, sure enough, on Thursday last week the newest (and by far the smallest and cutest) member of Team Picnik came into the world: little baby Rowan. Congratulations, Brian and family!

Celebrate our little blue planet today with our brand new ecologically awesome Earth Day Stickers!

Besides the leafy branches, earth, and recycling sign you see before you, we’ve got green housing, green energy, green architecture and green transport Stickers to choose from too. So enjoy making your environmentally sustainable, paper-free greetings today, and we all wish everyone a happy and natural Earth Day!

Those of you who use the microblogging sensation Twitter are probably already aware of twitter.com/picnik. From that chirpy perch, first Steve and now a whole flock of us watch every Twitter mentioning “Picnik” go by, and have built up a whole colony of happy Picnik users to follow. Those of you reading this blog post on the blog can see to your right the handy Twitter widget that keeps blog readers abreast of our past 5 tweets. And those of you who are looking at our Twitter page will notice that the most recent Tweet was posted from (be still your beating wings) Picnik!

That’s because the most recent addition to our covey of connections is Twitter! Now when you’ve completed Picniking, say, your photo of finches, you can Save & Share directly to your Twitter feed, while tweeting about it, all inside of Picnik! All this is possible thanks to our new partnership with Twitgoo, a media-sharing service created by Photobucket for posting pictures on Twitter.

But twittering isn’t all that you can do from inside of Picnik! You can also post your perfectly Picniked Profile Picture, or set it as your Twitter background! Happy Twittering!

Have you noticed? Picnik is up for five awards this month! Four are conveniently located in the same place for easy voting:

• Best Startup: Picnik!
• Best Bootstrapped Startup: Picnik!
• Best Startup CEO: Jonathan Sposato of Picnik!
• Best Startup Product Designer: Peter Roman of Picnik!

And nominated for the best from the Audio & Video category in the Webware 100 Awards: Picnik!

So click those two little links, tick all the boxes that say “Picnik”, and wish us luck!

Two of the bestest startups in Seattle, Picnik and Wetpaint, have teamed up at last, bringing Picnik’s many photo powers into a seamless integration with Wetpaint! Picnik you know about, but in case you don’t know Wetpaint, they’re a wiki hosting and social networking service for regular people to collaborate online to create webpages about whatever interests them, with already over one million free wikis created. Picnik, too, is designed to give regular people photo-editing superpowers through simple but sophisticated editing tools and then save and share with friends, family, and the world, and doesn’t that sound like the point of a really good wiki? Now whenever you add a photo to your educational, lifestyle, or James Bond Wiki, you can click the Edit in Picnik link to add all of Picnik’s awesomeness to your Tudors fan photos, dogs pictures, or Daniel Craig’s DB9!

KrisD, our 13th Featured Picniker, is the second professional photographer using Picnik for her business! She lives in Belmont Heights, in Long Beach, with her husband and four-year-old daughter. She’s always been into the arts, and studied art, landscaping, and architecture at various colleges in Southen California, including Cal Poly Pomona and Santa Barbara City. She’s been drawing and painting since her childhood, but finds that since having her daughter she uses her photography as her canvas and editing tools (and Picnik!) as her media.

This background in fine art has definitely informed her photography, as she considers herself more of a photographic artist than a photographer since her real passion finds its expression in tuning her images with artistic effects, which is readily evident perusing her Flickr photostream. Collage, Cinemascope, Cross Process, and a fair amount of Reala 400 (a preset Curves effect in the Advanced section of Create), each one of her photographs is exquisitely turned out, whether brides, expectant mothers, children, or chihuahuas in shades. And all this using Picnik, and for her business as well! We were all so impressed we just had to pick her for our lucky 13th Featured Picniker.

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