contrary to my kindergarten report cards, the new york times says i have self-control

I was forwarded this recent article from the NYTimes, "A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names" because, not unlike the youth of Johnny Cash's famous song, I too have a predominantly female name.

Fortunately, research confirms that there isn't anything too detrimental about growing up with an effeminate name. Despite being named after a boxer (seriously), I've never been much of a fighter -- just don't call me "Alex" ;-)

Instead, I apparently validate the data:

“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”

So if you're thinking of naming your son something a bit atypical, maybe this will encourage you. If I have a daughter, I'm naming her "Steve."

And here's a photo of me looking well-adjusted with Harper of Threadless.
Those guys throw a great party.

ask to steal my design, will you?

This email was a first for me:

May I steal your design?

Hey
I'm designing my personal website, and I really liked your page layout on http://www.alexisohanian.com. Is it chill if I more or less copy it? You would, of course, get cited in the page source. You can see my rendition at: [redacted] . The site isn't yet complete, and I still haven't made it index.html, so nobody's seen it yet.
Thanks,
[redacted]

I didn't even think people visited that website, let alone wanted to gank the design. He even had the courtesy to email to ask if it was OK. What's happened to the Internet lately?

So as you can imagine, here was my response:

Re: May I steal your design?

Who the fuck do you think you are emailing me? Don't you know who I am? Of course you can't use my design ideas. I invented them. I own them all.

That shade of green I use, #90EE90 -- that hexadecimal -- belongs to me. The line-spacing, the small caps, the background-color property on the hover, they're all the property of Alexis Ohanian.

What if everyone went around "getting inspired by" (i.e., stealing) other people's designs? Huh? Real creativity would die, that's what.

Thanks for putting a rusty shiv in the abdomen of creativity. Jerk.

UPDATE: Judging by the comments below, I see a few of you didn't realize this was a joke (and that I didn't actually send that reply). But thank you for articulating your thoughts. To reinforce my point and prove that I'm not in fact that much of a jerk, I've included my actual reply.

Re: May I steal your design?

hey [redacted],

By all means, gank away.

I do appreciate you letting me know, though. There's that cliche about imitation and flattery :) so I'm quite happy you've decided to borrow some of my ideas. It's totally chill.

-Alexis

comment is free -- so free even i can do it

I was recently given the opportunity to write a piece for the Guardian's Comment is free. It was odd writing in a format that I knew wouldn't be on a blog with a smirking avatar on the footer. They even asked for a professional-looking photo. I was a little disappointed they didn't go with this version. Oh well.

All in all, it was a great exercise. You can read the article here, or if you're the kind of person who buys/downloads the "director's cut" DVD, you may want to read the un-edited version I submitted (note the reddit propaganda baked right into the original headline):

"I read it on reddit" -- the future of news?

Thanks to a Project for Excellence in Journalism study published last week, there’s been a flurry of discussion about “social” news lately. The report compared the top stories from the major user-news sites with the headlines of the mainstream media. Several commentators have noted “the interests of users was markedly different to that of traditional editors.”(1) This shouldn’t shock anyone. Traditional news sources rely on editors to try and supply content their readers demand -- we’ve just got a much more efficient mechanism for it (click the up/down arrow) and a much broader range of content.

What most people writing about this report overlooked is the impact this movement is having (and will continue to have) on how news is consumed. Admittedly, while sites like reddit more effectively deliver the news their readers want, they presently still rely quite heavily on the traditional media as sources (and whipping boys, depending on the day). However, as these online destinations become the front page for more people, news-seekers will no longer be reliant on editors’ choices. With a medium as fast and as rich as the Internet, combined with proliferating sources of accurate and timely news, the value is shifting away from the corporation. For instance, the Gray Lady can’t keep getting by solely on her reputation. Brand matters less and less -- power is shifting toward the individual journalists in her newsroom and across the world.

It means that news organizations must acknowledge they cannot monopolize the news as easily as they used to. Counting on people to read the front page of the X, "because it's the X," won't suffice. Quality of content -- not branding -- will become the metric for reputation. And why not?

Furthermore, there is something to be said for the content that can only be found when hundreds of thousands of people are scouring the web. The traditional media can’t replicate the delight one feels when serendipity conjures up an interesting link. How else would I have found a picture of the Milky Way from Death Valley, laughed about this newspaper gaffe, or learned the math behind dating pools?

As I see it, the greatest threat to this fledgling movement is from within. These sites are communities like any other, and can become just as insulating. It's part of the dilemma behind giving readers news they want versus news they ought to know (according to editors). We've deftly avoided solving this problem by letting readers decide for themselves. From our perspective, active consumers of news are inevitably better informed than passive ones.

Not to bring up a sore point with my gracious hosts, but back in 1776, thirteen rowdy colonies championed freedom of the press – today we’re all struggling for freedom from the press. Let’s hope we can do some good with it.


(1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6990033

rubbing it in, my fantasy superiority

Last year, despite how much I love professional football, I was dead last in my NFL fantasy league. Steve would regularly remind me of this fact. Even months after the season ended. It was my first try at fantasy football and the idea of drafting the entire Skins lineup seemed like a good idea at the time.

It's like putting all of your eggs in one basket, only dumber, because you've put the basket in the middle of a busy freeway.

This year, we switched away from Yahoo! to a startup called Fleaflicker. So far, it's been a much improved experience for two important reasons. Not only is Fleaflicker a superior site (with a cool mascot, too) -- I'm also currently at the top of my league.

I'm not sure how long this will last, so I'm writing about it now to properly rub it in. You'll notice that Steve (spez) is second, which really just makes him a loser.I'll keep the updates coming as the season progresses. That is, until I start losing, in which case you won't hear anything more about it. Steve doesn't have a blog, so this story will disappear faster than a Gitmo detainee.

i scratched my blackberry :-(

Some of you may scoff, but I love my BlackBerry 7130c -- I love it so much I've dropped and scratched the hell out of it for the last year and a half. Although I don't have any children, I suspect this is the same way a doting parents show their love.

But no matter how hard I try, it just won't break. Those Canadians are crafty.

How am I supposed to appreciate this phone if I can't buy a new one every three months?



(Yes, this is news.)

i broke my gmail

"You are almost out of space for your Gmail account."

I never thought this day would come. There is no website I use more often -- no application more important to me -- than Gmail.

And now I've almost hit my storage limit. I never thought that percentage would get higher than 20%, or maybe 30%. But where we are at 97% and I'm getting a cold sweat.

My inbox is suffocating. What if Natalie (Portman) finally replies to my emails and they bounce back. If she decides to attach pictures, there's no way in hell I'll get them.

Get a hold of yourself, Alexis. Just delete all that spam, that's it.

OK, down to 93%. I can breathe again.

I hope none of you ever have to see this message.

If you have, or if you ever do, I'm here for you.

But not at this moment. I need to go lie down.

easy as pi

I'm in L.A. this week as a prop to sell some ads on reddit. Today was my first presentation to folks interested in buying ad space (much less pressure than pitching to people you want to buy your company) and I feel pretty good about it. But I knew this week was going to go well as soon as I checked into my hotel.

I have a remarkable skill for forgetting simple things like my keys, days of the week, and hotel room numbers. I'm the guy you see jabbing one adjacent room after another with my keycard, muttering Klingon cursewords. And that's sober.

Last night, when I was handed my key and told my number, I smirked. This I wouldn't forget -- jetlag and all.

wow? wow...

I walked away from World of Warcraft shortly after hitting 60. I'm only human. That, and I was actually a human paladin, which should explain why the game stopped being fun.

I'll never forget when I finally discontinued my subscription, because a benign questionnaire asked me my reason for quiting. In this country, we put a lot of emphasis on not quitting. I think this makes us try harder to come up with a good excuse to quit -- hence the multitude of options for why I'd be canceling my WoW subscription.

I don't remember the exact wording, but after passing up "Financial difficulties" and "Military service," I settled on "Addiction."

Make no mistake, I wasn't addicted, but it seemed like a good answer. Certainly better than "Finally got a girlfriend."

Anyway, after submitting the form, I was comforted with an apologetic message from Blizzard telling me that they sympathized with my problem. And they offered -- only when I was ready to balance my "WoW life" with my "real life" -- to gladly take me back as a member. Sweet.

That was over a year ago. Imagine my surprise when I found this in the mail last week:

I never did get to play Burning Crusade... ride a flying mount... hit 70...

Oh Blizzard, you're good -- too good.

an nfl story that's not about michael vick

I was born into a football (American) household, so please allow me this philistine indulgence. No matter how hard I try to carry around books, like technology, and use the word philistine -- I'll always succumb to gameday Sundays.

Through chance, I became a fan of the Washington DC team with an unfortunate name, because it was the only NFL team near the town where I grew up. It was my dad's favorite team and thus it became mine. Football was a bonding thing, and it still is today (to give you an idea, upgrading dad's nosebleed season tickets was the first thing I did last Halloween).

I caught a preseason game two weekends ago and was reminded by a fellow fan of a sad fact: "In 1961, the Redskins were the only team in professional football without a black player."

The team's owner, George Preston Marshall, was an avid bigot. Incidentally, he'd also been the man who changed the team's name from the Braves to the Redskins. Integrating the franchise of our nation's capital turned out to be quite an ordeal, as the above ESPN article details.

Sitting there, watching the starters take the field, I couldn't help but wonder what the team would look like if ol' Marshall had his way. So as part of this thought exercise, I thought I'd list the starting lineups as they are and as they would be without black players.


Needless to say, it be pretty hard to fill a roster these days with such narrow guidelines (although it could be done, the team wouldn't likely be going to many Super Bowls). On that note, fans would be quick to point out that Washington was also the first team with a black quarterback (Doug Williams) to start the Super Bowl (they won, by the way -- Williams was named MVP). Ironic, no?

Granted, coaching staffs are still remarkably homogeneous on most teams, but even this is finally starting to change as we get blatant reminders about how immaterial race is to winning (see Tony Dungy). Everyone from the owners to the fans just want to win. Except Eagles fans. I think they actually enjoy losing.

Now if only we could divert all this attention (and money) we spend following football to something more productive or meaningful...

save our earth... and drink fiji bottled water?

This was a curious juxtaposition in my Marriott bathroom.

The offer they make to not wash towels is a solid appeal to anyone's inner treehugger, but sitting next to that imported bottle of H2O it feels a bit hollow.

I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought if I hadn't seen this article on reddit a while back: "1 liter Bottled Water uses 26 Liters Water + 1 Kg Fossil Fuel + 1 Pound CO2."

Yikes. I won't bother summarizing; you pretty much get the gist of it from the headline.

I'm a big fan of what I call "passive activism," because it makes me feel slightly less guilty about all the negative repercussions of my existence with a minimal amount of effort.

So when I'm given the chance to "help conserve the Earth's vital resources," I'm happy to oblige -- I just wonder if the Fiji Water company knows it's paying for ironic product placement.

According to my friends in Williamsburg, irony is very in right now. Maybe they even paid a premium for it.


UPDATE: Alexis still prefers drinking his Brooklyn tap water (through the filtered water pitcher in his fridge). If the Brooklyn Water Management, Co. would like to reach Mr. Ohanian for a product endorsement, please contact him via email (alexis@reddit.com).

someone send this thing some cuttles

Less then two weeks after championing cuttlefish as the new medium of Internet expression, Cute Overload has found the saddest cuttlefish ever.

This should be seen as a call to arms (all eight of them) -- send some cuttles, folks.

We're clearly not doing enough as a movement, so despite all the recent allegations of inappropriate Wiki-editing, I've gone ahead and updated the Cuttlefish Wikipedia entry.

Let us rally behind this sad, sad cephalopod and further the global pro-cuttlefish agenda.


UPDATE: Curses! Those Wikipedians work quickly. My addition was deleted within five hours on the preposterous grounds that it was "self-promotion." Pfft.

Let me assure you all that I am not, nor have I ever been, a cuttlefish.


*Tip of the hat to ikirigin for finding the above pic.

newsweek insults me

Flipping through an issue of Newsweek today (I'm OK with admitting that) I found a scathing article by Sarah Kliff entitled "[Facebook]... And Why I Hate It."

On the surface, it may not appear to be about me at all, but look a little closer and you'll find an unconscionable attack aimed squarely at me.

She didn't even wait until after the subtitle to launch her assault: "The site nurses my worst self-indulgent instincts. Does anyone really care that I love penguins?"

Kliff must have known that I was the creator of the "I Heart Penguins" facebook group.

I've cultivated a thoughtful community of unabashed penguin lovers who have bonded to proclaim their love for these adorable birds. We've even collected 12 penguin photos and started thoughtful discussions like "what's ur favourite penguin? why do u like penguins?"

And yet Kliff has the audacity to declare we might be missing something in the "real world" with all the time we waste on facebook.

She even dares to erect the straw man claiming we spend time "debating whether penguins or bagels are more respectable."

Debate? There is no debate -- unless perhaps Sarah would like to start an "I Heart Bagels" facebook group.

Bring it on, Sarah Kliff.

learning from linkedin

According to a recent piece of LinkedIn mail:

Fact: Adding 5 connections makes you 3.7x more likely to receive a job offer

Oh boy! With odds like that, I'd be a fool not to make 5 more connections.

I'm going to start adding this signature to all of my outgoing mail:

Fact: Telling people about my blog (redditAll.com) makes you 3.8x more likely to get your startup acquired

Because 3.7x just wasn't good enough.

best usage of catbutt, ever

You don't find signs like this every day. It's a shame, life would be so much better if more companies incorporated catbutt into their logos. I wonder how the web 2.0 version of this logo would look...

If you look closely, you'll even see where they've painted over the work of some vandals presumably making the logo anatomically correct.

confused by inefficiency: better living through technology

I like technology. I'm not obsessed with it (read: I don't own an iPhone) but I'm interested in it.

I really like technology when it makes me more efficient -- or at least feel more efficient, which I perceive to be just as valuable (read: I'd have an iPhone if the keyboard could accommodate my ogre-thumbs).

Last week a couple friends came over for some beers and a few hours later we're thinking about seeing that new Bourne movie (SPOILER: Jason Bourne is the only man alive who could not only roundhouse kick Chuck Norris to death, but also cripple Jack Bauer with a paperclip -- all in way less time than 24 hours). We find a theater in Brooklyn with a late showing and head over.

Unfortunately, half the borough was also planning on seeing a movie that night, so we found ourselves standing in a massive line to speak with one of two very tired looking ticketsellers. I have to admit, I rather mindlessly stumbled into place when a buddy pointed to the nearby ticket machines.

Of course! There were no fewer than four machines going totally unused. As far as I know, they had the exact same tickets those humans were selling, only without the line. A few finger jabs and a minute later, we were in line for popcorn.

But the thought lingered: Why were we all standing there waiting?

I know it's not because the machines only accept credit cards. There's way too much credit card debt for that to be the reason. I know how much people dislike waiting in lines. Maybe it's masochism?

A fear of touchscreens? Sure a lot of other people have wiped their fingers on it, but this is Brooklyn, groping those steel handlebars, we ride the subway into the city every morning. People die on subways.

Perhaps we just distrust machines -- or we miss the human connection absent in our isolated and increasingly automated lives?

About a year ago, a tech reporter told us that, "I'm not a robot guy." And he's a tech reporter.

I guess he's not alone. Could that many people have seen I, Robot?

I think Skynet started with automated ticket machines. That's it.

There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. Stop waiting in those lines people, use the machines. Before they start using us.

the 1/2/3 rule of powerpoint

With all this talk about YC presentations, the timing seemed right for me to unveil my new PowerPoint™ rule. Guy Kawasaki evangelized his 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint to great acclaim, I figured the same could work for me and my 1/2/3 Rule.

I've given this style of presentation quite a few times over the last year since I became slightly less insignificant. The trial run was at Startup School Stanford (here's the ppt); afterward, I got some encouraging feedback and a few invitations to do the schtick again. The idea was really just an extension of a BarCamp presentation we -- err, Pierre Francois and Ian Gilbert -- did last year. This was of course a blatant rip-off of Stephen Colbert's The Word, the 2.0 version.

I don't suffer from anything particularly bad (maybe the occasional allergies) and I rarely see pitches -- so I haven't got any form of Kawasaki's "Ménière’s of the VC community" -- but I really like pictures. This is aims to be a model for a more entertaining (I didn't say informative) style of presentation.

It's very simple really. A 1/2/3 presentation should have 1 focal point on each slide, each slide shouldn't take more than 2 seconds to comprehend, and the majority of the slides should be images from one of 3 categories: ironic pictures, funny photos, or cute animals (always a crowd-pleaser).*

This style of PowerPoint presentation requires a fuckload™ of slides, but they should almost all be pictures that you can advance through rather quickly. If it's gotta be text, it should be for an emoticon -- or maybe five words tops.

Our attention spans have evidently gotten even shorter since Kawasaki's decree.

Granted, getting the timing right on this takes some practice, but I think you'll find it to be well worth it. Hint: the "preview next slide" functionality in most presentation modes is a great cheat as long as you can furtively peek at it.

If you're still reading this, I'm sorry. But your curiosity has at least gotten you this far, so let me give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Here's a reenactment:

(Imagine a captivated audience and me standing behind a podium, broad-shouldered and visionary.)

"When Steve and I started reddit, we were just trying to build a site that wasn't annoying -- " (click)



"-- or tacky and trendy --" (click)



"-- Above all, we wanted reddit to be simple." (click) "Dead simple."


(Too easy, I know, but I couldn't help myself.)

Throw in a couple jokes about Java and you're golden. I've pretty much recycled this same presentation about five times now, adding and removing various slides depending on the audience, so please feel free to gank.

Even if you can only squeeze a couple LOLCATs into your next quarterly earnings presentation, I think you'll be quite pleased with the results.





*One of these days, I'm doing an all-LOLCAT presentation.

y combinator demo day boston

Another geeky summer in Boston has come and gone. I've tried to stay pretty involved with the new founders, since I haven't got a startup of my own anymore and my blog needs traffic (and material).

I've been fortunate enough to have attended every demo day and I must confess, this was the best one. They had to cram 19 startups (is that right?) into a reasonable amount of time, which meant no Q&A (a wonderful thing) and only 7 minutes per presentation. We had something like 15 minutes to blab about how reddit was different from del.icio.us (yep, that's the kind of question we got asked back in August 05); the curtailed time allowance meant each presentation was crisp.

Oh, and the food was good too. I must have eaten ten figs and a pound of cheese & fine meats.

I'd better not comment on any of the particular startups; I'll likely be transforming a few of them into reddit logos anyway. With so many startups, it'd also mean a lot of typing. I'll just let Techcrunch handle that. I'm no Arrington, anyway -- I would fully disclose. Hehe.

But here's the ingenious part of Demo Day Boston: one week later (today), they're doing it again at the Mountain View office for the west coast investors. You could hear the clock ticking* during the bustle of all the post-demo schmoozing. Very shrewd.

Not surprisingly, PG had an apt analogy for it: like feeling pressured to ask out the charming smalltown girl before she leaves for Hollywood.

Well, they're all in Cali right now...



*It turns out Jessica had in fact placed a very loud clock in the room.

times selective

A funny thing popped up last week that I only now sat down to write about. Earlier in the week, I'd read that the wall of TimesSelect was coming down. This pleased me. It always seemed a bit counterintuitive to restrict access to your site's best content. But I'm part of that entitlement generation that wants its Internet to remain free. Where's mah cookie?

Anyway, I found a nifty little op-ed by Roger Cohen called "Is There Wisdom in Crowds?" As someone who loves a hearty critique of a tired cliche, I couldn't help but want to read it. Alas, this was where the link sent me:

The Internet has made the views of crowds more accessible while rendering them less dangerous.
To continue reading this article, you must be a subscriber to TimesSelect.

What a tease. Fortunately, there's a site called Behind the Times that specializes in getting behind the Times subscription barrier. I could finally read this Intl. Herald Tribune piece. Hurray.

Cohen gets off to a great start, comparing digg to "a few 20th-century bummers, not least in Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and China." But this is too easy, and Valleywag has already been here, so I'll move on.

What didn't surprise me were the cherrypicked popular links that featured the inane and trivial. Granted, reddit has it's days, but we designed it simply to be a site where people find and share interesting content. If they get informed while being entertained, it's an bonus. There is an important need in any healthy (keyword) democracy for its population be informed. But we're not kidding ourselves, reddit was built as somewhere to go when you're bored at work -- any knowledge gained is gravy.

I'm still waiting for the Today Show segue from Hefner's rape denial to Mr. Blank's online disclosures. (Yeah, I cherrypicked that Hefner story, it was the top story on the Today Show website.)

But I acknowledge that the Today Show is just selling to its audience. Have you seen this show after 9am? These cherries are delicious!

I know nothing about this industry, but I suspect they measure this in ratings and advertising revenue. It's why this question asked by Cohen is such a pertinent one (and not just because it gets its own paragraph).

But it only begs the question: What makes stuff - a story, a book, whatever - a hit rather than a flop?

Ignoring his misuse of "begging the question" (thanks, PG) he has made a seamless transition to the core issue. Media is produced to be "a hit" whether it's a movie or book (as he posits) or news.

Why stop talking about news as a commodity? Oh right, I'm more comfortable imagining a producer deciding if it'd be worth financing a sequel to Ghost Rider* than thinking about an editor deciding which front page story will sell more copies...

I suspect the troubling part is that on sites like reddit, the curtain is now raised. The same mechanisms are in place, only the "consumer feedback" comes much faster.

When the audience wants LOLCATs, they get LOLCATs. Just once I want to hear Ann Curry say "Mr. Blank."

With the right mechanisms in place, reddit can give people what they want and maybe a few things they didn't know they wanted. We're still working on that, but I'm pretty sure we're not working toward totalitarianism (or is that exactly what you'd expect me to say, Comrade?).




*Answer: Of course it would be.

cupcakes

This blog, redditall.com, has long prided itself on only publishing content we believed to be of the highest quality. We have also never shied away from giving strongly biased reviews of dot.com startups.

I'd like to stray from the traditional formula and talk briefly about a fantastic bakery here in New York.

It's called Crumbs. And it's way better than that Magnolia place you've probably heard about. Cupcakes 2.0!

Find them in Manhattan at one of four locations: Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Bryant Park, and Downtown (the best one, like a tasty center in between the East and West Village).

Unfortunately, I'm not getting compensated for this plug. But that's a good thing, right?

If you'd like me to shill for your product, make sure it's something edible -- it's much harder for the Feds to track down.

Are you listening Senator Stevens? We already knew that the U.S. Congress is just a series of bribes, anyway.

greatest day of my life?

I don't mean to gloat, but I just got friended by Jason Calacanis.

The tricky part is going to be coming up with a good "friend detail" since our only interaction was during the Netscape offer to gank top reddit users. Nevertheless, thanks for the facebook friendship, Jason, I hope you poke back.

Maybe now Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman will finally start returning my calls...