sxsw update: there's lots of free beer in austin

team reddit is having a great time with Ben of Grooveshark

In 24 hours, I still hadn't learned a new facial expression. This was at the facebook party, which featured Michael Stipe, but no Zuckerberg -- or SugarMountain, as I call him. Valleywag dutifully covered the party and snapped the above picture.

Photos from last night's digg party will be going up as soon as I can find the USB cable. There should be some good pictures of Jay Adelson, Garrett Camp, and me floating around somewhere -- a nefarious triumvirate of sites wasting the Internet's time.

reddit nostalgia: whence came the name?

A recent self post on Hacker News asking "How did you choose a name for your startup?" got me all nostalgic, so I thought I'd share my response:

We knew the site would involve reading what's new online, so I would spend classtime thinking about domains involving something like "read." It was also during this classtime that I first doodled the alien in the corner of a notebook.

I was in my beloved Alderman library when "reddit" came to mind, as in "I reddit on reddit" (although this slogan was courtesy of PG). I'd also registered reditt because I couldn't decide which one was better. Granted, I was worried about how poorly it was spelled, but it seemed easy enough to remember.

For a time, it was just added to a long list of potential names. We spent the first month of YC without a confirmed name, but I always stuck with reddit despite being repeatedly told how terrible a name it was :-)

Finally Steve acquiesced and we went with reddit. This was after wasting a solid 2 entire days just hunting for domains -- not a great use of time, I must say.

It was also before instantdomainsearch, which I highly recommend.

a new redditor is born

OK, well, that's not necessarily true, but the world could probably use another geek baby.

Jeremy pointed me toward a comment on reddit yesterday that was from an interesting photo collection of start-to-finish pregnancy -- with triplets.

A redditor named brobak commented:

You know, I couldn't make this up if I tried. I am actually sitting in the hospital delivery room, with my wife. She's been in labor since 5am. Its...10:42pm as i write this. I hopped the hospital wifi, because there's not much for me to do now that she's on the epidural and resting(and yes, I am that much of a nerd that i'd actually post to reddit while in labor and delivery). She's stalled out at 8cm, and we're waiting for the petocin to kick in and see if we can push her over the edge to pushin' time.

We've only got a single in there, so she wasn't nearly that large, but i tell ya, its a hell of an experience. Here's hoping we can finish this up tonight. Wish me luck reddit.

It was a momentous day; the first time a baby was born live on reddit. Probably.

Either way, the response from the community was overwhelmingly positive and laced with a few good jokes.

We got an update from brobak later that night:

EDIT: Just wanted to post a follow up briefly. My son was born at 4:27am on the 8th. After 23 hours of labor, 2 hours of pushing, they decided that it wasnt happenening and went to a c-section. It worked out fine, and the kid came out fine, and in good shape. needless to say we're exhausted, but I did want to post a follow up and thank you all for your support. Thank you.

Success! A healthy mommy and baby brobak probably missed today's reddit logo getting some well-earned rest, but hopefully a few other redditors noticed the little babe in blue.

Apparently hospitals here in the States do this kind of newborn sex identification with little hats? I would use nail polish "B" or "G" like on a pet turtle, but that's just me.

Congratulations once again. It's a shame we don't sell reddit baby-tees or I'd send them one for baby brobak. Oh well, hopefully the logo will do. One day, when baby brobak is old enough, he's going to be really confused by all this :-)