star-crossed websites

We've been partnering with the Gawker empire (is it a capital "E"?) for quite some time and been quite pleased with everything. In exchange for some advertising we got to place on their blogs (more on this in a future post), we built some plug-in reddits so their readers could submit and vote on t-shirt slogans. These are basically stripped down reddits -- only submissions and votes -- along with all the nifty sorting options. It turns out this works out pretty well, as the shirts seem to be selling well. We certainly never would have come up with this, but Scott over at Gawker had the idea, which appears to be a great success.

Now, we're a part of the Conde Nast "family" (hold on, this is going somewhere) which I've learned has a sort of Montague & Capulet thing (sorry, that wasn't worth it) going on with Gawker. I wonder which one that makes us?

Nevertheless, the acquisition fortunately hasn't affected our relationship with that snarky blog network. And as a result, more folks are walking around with shirts letting onlookers know that "Yes, I'm Quietly Judging You". I'm deciding between "Wouldn't it be ironic if you went the fuck back to Williamsburg" and "I adopted a third-world baby and all I got was this lousy third-world baby".

Either one is going to be a great Mother's Day gift.

Still doubting the wisdom of crowds?