happy halloween

Long-time redditor, Adam Fuhrer, sent over this over.

We've evidently got a mole in digg, a pumpkin-carving reddit sympathizer. That, or it was going to be used for smashing.

Either way, I think it had a good chance of winning the digg pumpkin carving contest. Kevin booed the reddit alien, but that's OK; I know he's going out dressed as it this year.

a splasy surprise - email from wikipedia

This was a first.

Hi, I'm a Wikipedia administrator and was wondering if you would be willing to license the Mr. Splashy Pants reddit logo under an open source license for usage in the Mister Splashy Pants article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Splashy_Pants).

Of course I said yes. You can bet Splashy would have done the same for any of us.

In fact, I'd already uploaded the SVG files for both Splashy and "Fightin' Splashy". He truly is one hell of a whale.

We're likely going to be overhauling our environment.reddit in the coming months -- Splashy will be playing a pivotal role.

pirate aliens coming to a website near you

Our sympathies are well known. Pirates are the chosen people of the flying spaghetti monster. It should surprise no one that we also offer a pirate reddit button.

What should surprise you is that people are actually using it.

We made an Ahab-style offer last week, the bounty was simple: a bobblehead to whomever sent me a link to one.

Lucas, of eleZeta, was first to deliver. Congrats. May the bobblehead bring you much distraction and simple amusement.

But http://ty.rannosaur.us gets the honorable mention for having both a pirate reddit button and tag cloud.

thanks, deadspin, we <3 you, too!

Bernie Davis, a friend of reddit here at CondéNet, sent this over.

Just an innocuous link on Deadspin, right?

Follow the link back to Washington Post and you'll find an interest referrer -- reddit.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/22/AR2008102201645.html?referrer=reddit

This was a pleasant surprise, Rick. You know, we've really got a lot in come, you and sports.reddit. I smell a partnership...

We may be star-crossed lovers, what with you being a "Denton" and we being a "Nast," but like a modern-day Montague and Capulet romance -- what could possibly go wrong?

reddit and the independent team up to create internet awesomeness

In case you missed it on reddit, we've announced a partnership with The Independent.

Readers of The Independent will now have a reddit to call their own, with nifty reddit voting buttons coming soon beneath every article.

Cnet's Caroline McCarthy got the scoop, which even made its way to digg

mike alstott gets punked on sunday night football - tampa bay maintains its legacy of fail

I don't think I've got a lot of NFL fans reading this blog, but I couldn't help but post this snapshot from this past Sunday Night Football game.

One of the best Tampa Bay Bucaneers, Mike Alstott was being honored at half time with a pair of framed jerseys (both the original, heinous orange Buccaneers jersey, and the less appalling one they were now).

It must have been a special night for Alstott and his family. So why did they have a typo on his jersey? (Oddly enough, the modern jersey had it spelled correctly.)

Yep, Als[t]ott. Unless he happened to change his surname after his first few years in the season, someone in Tampa got fired today.

Update: Ah, this is what I get for being sleep-deprived. Not a typo, just a memento.

will the real reddit please stand up?

The Biker Forum: By Bikers For Bikers showed up as a Google News Alert for "reddit." It's not the kind of place I'd expect a reddit shoutout, but maybe they're celebrating the one year anniversary a chopper.reddit community they created. They're English, too. I wonder if there's another slang for "chopper" in the UK...

But I digress. The shout-out was in fact for a biker in the community named reddit.

Hope you had a great birthday, reddit, I'll gladly send you a birthday bobblehead if you email me your address.

The only downer to all this was seeing a set of familiar 'social news and bookmarking' icons -- but reddit is missing.

aliens invading ars technica

While I was in Hungary, Steve got his drink on with the Ars Technica crowd, who celebrated their 10 year anniversary in New York last week. Ten Years. Damn. I didn't think decades existed in the dot-com world.

MediaPost's Kelly Samardak was charmed by my blue-eyed co-founder and the PR-force-of-nature, Jenna Landry (with pic!)

So I'm standing at the bar talking to Reddit founder, Steve Huffman, who by the way reminds me of this kid who I used to club over the head in 4th grade with my broken wrist cast. I can say that because Steve and I might both look like 4th graders today [...] I left Jenna and Steve to ponder Steve's fame and yukked it up with Gary and Bernie Davis.

Coincidentally, this was the week a reddit alien landed at the Ars offices in Chicago. According to the flickr pic, it's found a good home. Congratulations, Ars, and if you need any more bobbleheads, email me. I'm counting on a box of Ars bobbleheads (any guesses as to what in the hell those would look like?) to show up in the reddit office one of these days...

so that's where algorithims come from... (hint: not storks)

This discussion started innocently enough, but quickly became one of those chin-stroking affairs that appear in reddit comments every now and then, warming my heart:

> the concept of an algorithm

Really? Do you know of an Arabic or Indian algorithm that pre-dates Euclid's (Greek, of course) algorithm for computing greatest common divisors? That's from about 300 BC and I was always taught that this was the first known example of an algorithm found in history. I'd be very interested to hear if this is not actually the case.

Copying and pasting the response here wouldn't really do it justice. See it in context. Careful, you're about to become smarter.

Thanks, reddit...

photography reddit gets a shout-out

Here's a community I could learn quite a bit from. I wish I could be an active participant in the photography reddit community, but I'm a total camera n00b. That said, one active redditor took the time to write up the site on the GiiNii blog.

If you have never visited Reddit, you don’t know what you’re missing. Reddit is a great (the best, in my opinion) social media site. Users from all over the world go to Reddit to submit links to interesting Web sites they find. And now, Reddit has a photography page.

Called a subreddit, the Photography page allows users to post interesting pictures, tricks and tutorials. It’s a great community with lots of discussion about cameras and photography in general.

Want an easy way to get quoted on my blog? Say incredibly flattering things about reddit. It's easy!

That said, I actually just found a slick (free!) auto image stitcher thanks to this reddit. Huzzah!

<3 gossip? there's a new reddit in town, in heels

Last Thursday we announced our most radical reddit redesign yet: WeHeartGossip.

Dear readers, you'll find that this community is perfect for all of your shameful brain-indulgences. And by that I mean it's full of celebrity gossip; in case the name didn't give it away.

You may notice a few ads around the CondéNet empire for it, but I also designed one specifically for the reddit community. I wonder if advertising can have the same effect as peer pressure...

After flipping the switch, I was asked by Brent Csutoras about why we're moving away from Lipstick (a site we developed back in 2006) and to a new, slightly more pink gossip site.

My response:

“We thought the lipstick brand was too geared toward women and men who wear lipstick. As a man who doesn’t wear lipstick, but is curious about Natalie Portman’s dating habits, I personally wanted a site that was less pigeonholing.

The important thing for us was to create a new vertical that was totally unrelated to the existing Reddit network. Celebrity gossip was about as unrelated as we could get, as you pointed out by the low subscription count.

The goal with WeHeartGossip is to create a standalone site; subscription count isn’t a focus, traffic is. That, and Devendra Banhart — I can’t believe Nat is dating him…"

Nat, I know you're reading this. All I'm asking for is a second chance. I'll leave my lightsaber at home. I promise.

martin sargent - fan of breadpig (and reddit?) - rocks and this video proves it

Martin Sargent invited me to an interview on his show, Internet Superstar, over at Revision3. They've been doing some great work; I'm just sorry they've hit such a low and brought me on.

The breadpig already blogged this, but in case you missed it:

I didn't want to be a lousy guest, so I brought a few gifts. I wonder if they've gone skeet shooting with the bobblehead yet...

philosophy reddit is taking utah state by storm

I stumbled across a blog entry on the Utah State University Philosophy Departments website that reviewed our philosophy reddit community. Now I feel like I ought to design a custom logo for them, but Rodin's Thinker just seemed too cliche.

One quote that philosophy reddit submitter irony was most accurate:

Many of the regular users are really quite sharp, and they do not suffer fools gladly!

With some luck, a few new people interested in philosophy discovered reddit as a result. Thought, it may come back to haunt them around finals once they learn what it does to productivity...

the sociability of reddit - and why the vegan reddit doesn't jibe with bacon reddit

Here's an interesting post by zgiltner from a Human-Computer Interaction blog on the Sociability of reddit.

My favorite part of the analysis is below -- the observer rightly addresses the striking differences between communities.

Coordination

There are many different subreddits which coordinate the where people may look for certain subjects. In the screenshot I posted the article was submitted in the politics subreddit. The entire culture of commentors varies vastly from the “bacon” subreddit to the “vegan” subreddit. This allows users to narrow down their conversations. Users have been known to post other articles related to the discussion of the conversation, allowing further research on whatever topic and continuing conversation can happen.

reddit finds hope in a young jedi

I like propaganda as much as the next guy, but when it's starring Luke Skywalker, it achieves a new level of awesomeness.

What started as a popular reddit submission has now been anointed 'approved' fan artwork by the Lucas folks.

In fact, as my pal Pete (maker of Brawndo, what plants crave) noted in an email to me, the poster is now for sale (along with shirts).

laughing squid laughs out loud at our magnetic LOL poetry

Scott Beale, friend of the breadpig, just blogged about a certain kit of magnetic LOL poetry.

This is especially appropriate given Scott was the first person to ever document LOLmagnetz. That was back in April at ROFLCon. Many thanks to Scott for his continued support of breadpig's inanity.

A fellow cephalopod-lover, he also has great taste in friends, as evidenced by this picture.

google like it's 2001

Jeremy passed along this neat Google trick (for their 10th birthday) to search in the past -- 2001 to be precise, their oldest index. All the results are what you'd have seen in that glorious year of my high school graduation.

The results for "reddit" were a tad different, to say the least.

new reddit propaganda

Jim Hopkinson came up with the idea for a back to school ad to run on Wired and a few other non-reddit places within the CondéNet empire. I sat down yesterday and with some help from an old reddit avatar slapped this ad together.

And after hearing that our wrecking bar was received in Switzerland, I got inspired to do this house ad for gaming reddit. I'm clearly trying to start a feud between gaming and science communities.

pierre francois strikes back - how to start, run, and sell a web 2.0 startup

My secret weapon in the Pecha Kucha competition of the Business of Software Conference was to purge my presentation of any useful content and then fill that void with creamy nougat.

The result was Pierre Francois' second talk on Web 2.0 startups. He's recently started a company of his own, called 74 Signals. The guru is back, folks.

Neil Davidson kindly edited and uploaded the video. Keep an eye open for the Mister Splashy Pants shoutout.