early results from the redditor survey

Only because this didn't do terribly well when it was submitted from our dev blog. Here it is again, with a different font! And to those of you who have already filled it out (and likely contributed the following answers) -- thanks. This thanks will also be extended to those of you who do the survey after reading the answers of your fellow redditors, even the one who said reddit jumped the shark during "Paul Graham's breakfast."

We've gotten back some of the early results from our survey (that's right, you too can tell us about yourself!)

We thought you'd be interested in seeing these...

Q3. When do you believe Reddit jumped the shark?

• nyeh, i dont much worry about that.
• not sure
• Some time this year.
• The day Digg started censoring users over the HD DVD key
• stupid question. Why can't reddit just be evolving into a new paradigm?
• Has it?
• Jun-07
• February 14th, 2007 at 11:14am
• Uh, leading question? Not sure it has, just yet. I guess the overall quality of posts had declined since early '07.
• the shark had it coming
• ?
• sharks? where? SHARKS??? SHAAAARRRKKKKSSS!!!! (chomp)
• Lipstick
• During the Digg AACS key riot, the tenor of the site changed noticably.
• When it adds a reddit.reddit.com section. Then it will have jumped the shark.
• wtf does that mean?
• No real specific time. It's slowly been getting more like digg (with spikes here and there) as the userbase grows without having the ability to section reddit off into groups of similarly interested people. We need the new version!
• When Digg got caught censoring stories... well, probably a few months prior but that was when it became apparent.
• When it was purchased by Wired
• When it became an almost-entirely U.S.-politics-driven site. I'm very interested in politics, but very not-interested in re-re-re-re-re-posted variations of the same uni-dimensional political shrieking...
• When Digg deleted all those HD-DVD keys
• When the digg kids surged in.
• Yesterday.
• I don't know
• it hasn't yet
• When politics, America-sucks, and cops-suck took over the front page
• I don't understand the question. Now?
• It hasn't yet.... has it?
• Never!!
• when the digg users flooded in
• what?
• never
• don't know what you mean
• Paul Graham's breakfast.
• Probably a while ago; i would have to say, unfortunately, as soon as it became popular. Funny how that works...
• I'm not sure it has. But if I had to pick a time when it was closest, it was when I started getting 20 political articles out of 25 instead of the nice mix of several genres I used to get.
• Never. Reddit is a great resource.
• May 2007 -- When Digg users migrated en masse and the front page became extremely politics-centric.
• It was gradual. For once, I think it's fair to blame Bush: the Impeachment Day (in February, I think) was awful, and reddit never got better.
• Within the past six months.
• When they went to the West Coast
• If the "new" version never comes out, yes otherwise no.
• the time i sat next to alexis at a dinner and he was a totally self-centered, sarcastic, holier-than-thou, oh-i-am-so-cool asshole.
• Shark, what shark?
• I don't think it has jumped the shark, maybe it happened before I joined. I mostly stick to programming.reddit, which for the most part seems to be great.
• Ron Paul
• I don't think Reddit has jumped the shark yet. Asking this question is proof of that. I still have faith.
• There has been no shark jump yet.
• I don't think it has yet.
• Almost when there was the Digg fiasco over the magic DRM number, but seems to have recovered.
• I'm new here. I like post-shark reddit :)
• i think it never even reached the shark.
• It never really got up on to its waterskis for me. Just... it never settled in to my routine of reading; I suppose that the crowded design and not-quite-close-enough-to-useful bubble-up meant it wasn't for me.
• After all the political crap and pictures showed up.
• Well, you guys are still doing alright, but the quality of the front page really took a dive starting somewhere around November last year I think. Probably can't be helped though. The masses like their lolcats.
• I don't think it has, really.
• While I don't know real numbers, would say after it was bought by CondeNasty. Just hold up a Wired from 2000 to one from today an you'll see what I mean. But I still tell people about Reddit everyday.
• It didnt
• Did it?
• Reddit jumped the shark when subreddits moved everything except politics off the front page.
• What a pointed question! Hard to quantify with a specific time frame, but the main page started sucking since at least a few months ago. Well, noticeably at least. There were always the lingering, repetitious LOLcats and their ilk, but eventually that's ALL that the main page was. So I jumped ship to programming.reddit.com. The whole site hasn't "jumped the shark", just that the main page is rather uninteresting these days (blame it on the Digg users! Haha).
• Hah. Funny that you just assume that your users are dissatisfied. It was a gradual thing, of course. I remember all these great articles that used to be on the top all-time. Stuff about the Socratic Method, why so many numbers begin with 1, extreme learning, etc. And Paul Graham's essays, although I guess that's mainly because he was writing a lot then. Now it's mainly political stuff, and since I've personally decided that reading about politics is a waste of time, I try to stay off the site. But I get bored a lot.
• When Ron Paul became the ad hoc candidate of interest
• What?
• When DIDN'T it jump the shark? Reddit jumps the shark almost hourly.
• I believe that reddit started taking a dive a month or two before the buyout announcement. I don't think this was the fault of Reddit, but instead, the influx of new users. The programming subreddit (the only one I read daily), is still fairly decent.
• when you sold out
• September 2006, give or take a few months. I still hope it will recover.
• Last summer.
• I don't have enough information to say.
• 4-6 months ago, give or take.
• Needed the money.
• I don't think it did.
• After Digg's HDDVD rebellion
• When the digg users came.
• 2005
• Not yet

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.

send some cuttles

Matt Douglas, a friend of reddit from back in our Boston days, celebrated his wife's birthday on his startup's blog. I suspect he's using MyPunchbowl to plan the party.

Jessica (his wife) has evidently been quite supportive throughout his startup and this seemed like an appropriate gift on her birthday. Flowers wouldn't hurt either, Matt. Or maybe give her a reddit shirt...

Seriously though, startup life is wrought with uncertainty, but of the few guarantees is that it will test your relationships -- all of them. Some will thrive (e.g., Steve is now engaged, sorry ladies) and others won't.

You'll be counting on some kind of a support group through these times, it may even be a group of one, but it will keep you going. It's easy to forget to thank them.

So as a service to Matt and the rest of the startup world, I've created this image for you to send "CUTTLES!" to express just how you feel. It's cheaper than one of those lame Hallmark cards. (Click to enlarge)

Thanks to Liz for finding the original cuttlefish picture. I think they're cuddling. But look at that one in the back just watching... creepy.

the times they are-a changin'

j/k!

A friend emailed me yesterday to point out that reddit got a brief mention in a New York Times blog; Mike Nizza did the honor with an entry logging the chronological events following Karl Rove's resignation announcement.

In the meantime, news aggregation sites Digg and Reddit provide examples of pure, uncomplicated schadenfreude to complicate the two thoughtful blog post mentioned above:

* Karl Rove RESIGNS!!!
* Karl Rove Resigns - Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead [breaking news - no irony]
* Short and Sweet: Rove resigns!

I'll let you figure out which one didn't come from REDDIT!!!

Nizza even did the courtesy of linking to the two reddit submissions. I'm never one to turn down a few extra pageviews, but he didn't link through to the actual sources -- just http://reddit.com.

Those two reddit submissions were links to the Wall Street Journal and BBC.

Why not mention that those unorthodox (and admittedly rather silly) headlines were just links to mainstream media sources?

Granted, including that probably wouldn't help his nice contrast between the "thoughtful bloggers" he cited earlier in his entry and the rabble on "news aggregators." I just think the WSJ and BBC deserve a few of those pageviews, too.

Fortunately, I finally saw Avenue Q last week, so I knew what schadenfreude was. Only, I didn't think schadenfreude extended to individuals you already loathed. I don't think you're allowed to use a pretentious German word to describe something that's just part of disliking a person (and I am fairly certain most of the reddit community disliked Rove). Why couldn't Nizza have just quoted some of this thoughtful discourse.

Rove is getting the chance to spend some time with his family. That doesn't sound like much of a misfortune anyway. Would it really be so bad having Turd Blossom around the house more? Maybe he's got a kid running for office in student government...

Learn more about schadenfreude

(Sorry, this was the first vid that came up -- who doesn't like a good Evangelion remix?)

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.

build a reddit clone

My Google News Alerts alerted me to a recent ScriptLance project.

I want a clone of reddit.com but I want the news posts coming from different RSS feeds that I can specify. But it should have the option for user to post sites as well.

Basically people will see new news posts and they should be able to vote for them . Vote should be in the form of Agree Disagree (should show results in bar graph with percent) . Sample : http://manager.co.th/Home/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=9500000094325

Visitors should also be able to comment on the news in a threaded reply system. Comments should have a block feature so users can click to block in appropriate comments.

I must confess, I love saying "reddit clone." Sometimes I slip it randomly into conversations.

I want to you use this website for a non English speaking country (Thailand), and in the future other countries as well. Please design with localization in mind.

You can take the open source pligg and modify if needed.

Damn, you know, we're really close to finally re-releasing our multilingual reddits (with translated UIs). In fact, I should be translating the reddit UI into German for Chris right now...

Code must be optimise for high traffic site (500,000) visits a day.

Ambitious. I like it.

Only 5 days left to bid! It's a shame that Steve's non-compete will prohibit him from pocketing a few extra bucks.

my favorite axolotl

This happy creature appeared on reddit yesterday with the headline of This Fish Looks Like the Reddit Logo." Now, it turns out that the axolotl is an amphibian, but that doesn't change the fact that it looks uncannily similar to our alien mascot.

Mother nature evidently doesn't care about trademark infringements.

So I did the only thing I could do. Change the reddit logo. Give mother nature a taste of her own bitter medicine.

Sure enough, this got the attention of a few redditors. And before long, the entire thing got really meta with the original source of the axolotl photo, bountyfishing.com, blogging about the reddit logo change.

All while those happy little axolotls were obliviously swimming around Mexico's Lake Xochimilco.

i thought lisp would be fun to learn

There was a point during those early months of our startup when we tried something radical. Steve had been single-handedly building and administering reddit until this point and I wanted to help. Sure, we could discuss the site functionality together and I could whip up some mockups in Photoshop, but when it came time to write the software -- I was back to drawing aliens.

One day, Paul suggested I give Lisp a try.

First, some background:

I'd aced a couple Pascal classes back in high school and started enough Quake2/Half-life clans to know HTML and basic Javascript. I knew enough CSS to be dangerous, but was worthless when it came to cross-browser compliance (I'm looking at you, IE). I'd also taken a couple Java classes at community college and a VisualBasic class at UVA. And that was my "programming experience."

Hopefully you've caught your breath now and cleaned off the coffee/soda you've sprayed on your monitor. Don't let it get in your keyboard.

So, it was with this background that I agreed to give Lisp a try. I wanted to help Steve. And how hard it could it be? You should have seen what a Pascal master I was -- a semicolon-wielding god.

And Paul was quite enthusiastic about it. His confidence was inspiring. Only later did I learn that he was doing it because of a John McCarthy-funded recruitment program. Convert twenty people to Lisp and you get a gold watch.

Anyway, I pulled out my trusty notebook (typically reserved for doodles and bad poetry) and started taking notes.

Steve insisted I use Emacs and he set up my Lisp environment for me. I liked the GNU icon.

To his credit, Steve was uncharacteristically patient ;-) with me as he explained all the keyboard shortcuts that would make my life more efficient -- once I memorized them. In the meantime, it was going to be a frustrated series of sweaty and frantic finger pokes. By the end of that first day, I had filled my first page of notes.

If you look carefully, you can see how that day ended for me.

Needless to say, I didn't become the Lisp superstar (or even mediocre Lisper) I'd hoped to be.

In fact, I gave up quite soon thereafter. But it was for the best; Steve wouldn't have been very productive if he'd been answering my inane Lisp/Emacs questions every ten minutes.

program LIFE_OF_ALEXIS (input, output);
var
    to_do : string;
begin
    writeln('What what would like to do today?');
    readln( to_do );
    if to_do = 'learn Lisp' then
        writeln('Just quit now.')
    else
        writeln('Don't you have some aliens to be drawing?');
end.

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.

i'm out of ideas

And I'm only 24, yet what creativity I had has deserted me faster than my senior prom date.

Let history show that I used to build week-long narratives into the reddit logos. But that is no more. I need your help. If you've got a scenario for the alien and/or the penguin to get caught up in for roughly 5 panels (days), please submit it.

Or a theme like "dress the alien up like different Transformers for a week" could work, but a suggestion like "light the alien on fire" is less helpful. Plus, fire is hard to draw.

I'll do my best to illustrate it. You'll still get all the credit. Don't get your hopes up though, logo designers don't have groupies -- Zuckerberg gets them all (or as I hear they call him, SugarMountain).

Check out the hottest | newest | top-rated suggestions for a plot. And if you think they suck, submit your own.

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...

chime.tv: winning mashup camp in style

The alien endorses the "Best Mashup Contest" winners of this year's Mashup Camp, Chime.tv.

Taylor McKnight has now won the award two years in a row and Chirag Mehta is wearing a reddit shirt. I don't think I need to explain why we're taking time out from redditall.com's important editorial duties to commend this duo.

On its own merit, Chime.tv is pretty cool. And that has nothing to do with the fact that ZDNet called Taylor, "the world’s hottest mashup developer". But it didn't hurt.

Basically, it's a slick way to surf through the best videos on the web. The interface feels just as smooth as flicking through channels on your tv -- if your tv also has soft corners and gradients. Now, I'm far too busy drawing aliens to spend my days on chime.tv ;-) but if I could, I think I would.

Most importantly, they have a cute mascot (+15 points) that on mousehover, looks like it's cheering "yay!" (+20 points). Well done, gentlemen.

The whacked-out eyes are also reminiscent of an early version of the reddit alien.

Stay off the blow, lil' fella.

birthday wishes and monkey steals peach

Happy birthday, Jeremy. Instead of getting you a thoughtful, hand-crafted gift, I've instead opted to put your avatar on today's logo -- a slick regifting of last year's gift.

On an unrelated note, this fantastic ninja tutorial should finally give the pro-ninja camp some ammo against the pro-pirate lobby. It appeared on reddit today without any citation. Pity. Would someone like to take credit for this?

I'll direct all my energy the Ch'ueng Mo channel of the linkjacker's body and stop his/her heart.

re-confirmed: the internet is still for porn

My earlier post of Google search queries to reddit made its way onto India Uncut. Apparently the large percentage of Bollywood-related porn searches caught their attention. Amit Varma posits that "Indian libido drives the internet."

If it means more traffic to reddit, so be it. These searchers will only be disappointed now that nsfw.reddit is down; reddit is porn-free (99.9% of the time -- damn spammers). But apparently that doesn't matter. Guess what this blog's top search query is for this week?

indian nudes

Pay attention SEOers. I'm predicting a major surge in Bollywood-related keywords appearing in website footers...

Now why doesn't Thomas Friedman write about this kind of thing?


*Tip of the hat to Siddharth (not this one) for sending the India Uncut link to me.

linked in -- to what?

Facebook captured my soul a long time ago, but there have been a number of others vying for attention ever since. The most curious (and persistent) of them has been LinkedIn.

Frankly, I didn't get it when I got my first invite and a number of "connections" later, I still don't get it. Incidentally, even reddit the alien has a LinkedIn account. Feel free to "connect" -- I promise it'll give you a fantastic recommendation.

So it's the facebook for the business world? Everyone I work with is already on facebook and all we're using it for is checking out one another's cute friends.*

But then again, I'm probably not the target audience. I'm a startup guy who is only two years removed from college. Just give me someone to poke (figuratively, of course).

Those facts at the bottom of every piece of LinkedIn mail aren't convincing me.

Fact: I don't care how many (average) connections Harvard Business School grads each have** -- actually, I probably feel less inclined to participate in LinkedIn now that they've told me.

I'm not even a Yale graduate, this ire is rooted in pure UVA indifference to Ivy. Or maybe that's just rooted in state school insecurity? Gah. Moving on...

This originated from a chat I was having with a friend of mine about social networking sites and "young people." Then LinkedIn came up.

We'd both wondered whether real recommendations, or sincere introductions, had ever been made through the site. It feels like a major success when someone pokes me back; is there really something professional to be done on these kinds of sites?

You can't even find embarrassing party photos through the site, which is really what Facebook is for -- judging potential co-workers. (Yes Jeremy, we dug deep into your photo albums)

But this site has become so popular that plenty of folks must find it useful. I'd love to know why.

Please comment if you've got an endorsement (or would like to heap scorn) -- then "link in" with the alien.

*Don't think it's true? All your friends are doing it, but don't ask them or you'll look weird.
**Answer: 58

confirmed by the wsj: cats like rabbit meat

WSJ reporter, Charles Forelle, had obviously caught my earlier post of a cat tormented with live rabbit flesh, only to be scolded by its master.

Now the Murdoch Journal is reporting a boom in bunny meat being prepared, frozen, and shipped to cat owners. We can only assume that the raw Thumper is for their cats.

Thanks to the Chinese kibble scare combined with the undeniable appeal of succulent rabbit flesh, one entrepreneur is "selling about 1,000 pounds of raw rabbit each week."

That's a lot of rabbit.

Her company also happens to be called Hare Today (one can only hope her logo has Gone Tomorrow written beneath it.)

She even got a coveted WSJ hedcut (I'd have given her one for the punny company name alone). Bravo, Tracy.


(Thanks to nekoniku for submitting this)

*This entry was originally submitted with an unnecessary apostrophe in the title. Apologies to all the English majors this left writhing in pain at the sight of this glaring error.

feeling toxic? scientology has a cure

(front)

(back)

This isn't the sort of thing I expected to be handed on a walk through Midtown. Then I realized there's a church of Scientology right down the street from my office. Maybe one of these days I'll go in...

What I like most about this quiz is that even "If you've answered "Yes" to 3 or less [sic] of the above questions," you could still "have a level of accumulated toxins" that presumably require cleansing.

Not a day goes by that I don't feel "spaced out" or experience a drug "flasback."

cat + bunnies = ???

It starts out looking innocent enough...

mascots are cool again

I was lucky that Steve was in a good mood when I insisted that our -- at this point yet to be created -- startup ought to have a mascot. I showed him the alien doodle I'd made (while bored in marketing class, of all things) and rendered with a cracked shareware copy of PSP 5.

Our mascot has come a long way, but even then it still wasn't a very popular thing to do on a website. Perhaps folks were still smarting from the Pets.com sock puppet. I couldn't blame them, really.

But just today I learned of a new mascot and its startup, eSwarm.

I'd rather not waste your time explaining what the site does and instead point out its logo.


I suspect it's a locust. I hear they can be quite potent in swarms: +20 points.

the internet is for porn

(It must be Saturday.)

In case you needed further proof, or thought that reddit was above that sort of thing, Chris "Statman" Slowe recently pulled the numbers of the most common Google queries that brought users to reddit. It's not a list of search queries you'd likely find scrolling on the LCDs at the Googleplex. To quote Chris, "I'm not going to comment on it. Draw your own conclusions..."

5615 reddit
2466 sexycollegegirl
653 nude bollywood
536 nude bollywood actress
388 bollywood nude
358 nude actress
252 nude indian actress
247 sexy
205 reddit.com
200 redditt
184 buy viagra
172 aishwarya nude
168 bollywood nude actress
152 nude aishwarya
151 bollywood actress nude
141 oy kullanma
133 nude indian actresses
125 couples having sex
118 actress nude
115 google
95 nude hollywood actress
88 sex
84 hedwig dies
82 simple nudes
78 300 full movie
77 indian nude actress
72 iphone iqase flip
71 spanish royal sex cartoon
71 nude bollywood actresses
71 emma watson boobs
70 nude actresses
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65 britney spears no knickers
64 indian actress nude
64 desi mms
62 gold pennies on the ounce
61 indian actresses nude
60 lolita porn
57 all excess avenged sevenfold torrent
54 porntube
52 wet panties
52 lolcat bible
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50 nsfw video
47 sexy emma watson
46 reedit
44 nude bipasha
43 www.reddit.com
41 emma watson%27s boobs
39 watch friends online
39 friendster layout.com
38 youhentai
37 youtube to mpeg
36 hollywood actress nude
36 hentai youtube
36 bipasha nude
35 google blog
34 friendster-layout.com
33 asin nude
32 abby winters
31 moe hay ko
31 katie reese
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31 family porno
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30 spiderman pics.com
30 perfect boobs
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28 galbaldia hotel
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27 watch entourage online
27 jessica%27s new boobs
27 free online sex games
26 watch are you afraid of the dark
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25 programming reddit
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22 penis pictures
22 no knickers
21 redd.it
21 oy kullanma yerleri
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20 wtc7
20 track-your-partner.com
20 totally nsfw
20 site: science.reddit.com/info/

alexis doodles

OK, so I can't actually draw. My medium is pixel.


The moral of this story? Always use Photoshop/Illustrator for your logo.

Maybe I'll keep this role-reversal going and try writing reddit code next week...

sold!

The auction of our two laptops ended yesterday. I am happy to announce that it raised $1,124 for the American Brain Tumor Association.

steve doodles

Most people only know of Steve as the hacker who built reddit, but he also has a natural gift for art. Alas, the tiny region of the logo doesn't do this kind of talent justice, so here it is. It'd make a great desktop wallpaper:


(The alien did not consent to having that written on its chest)

t-minus 3 hours until brain tumors are obliterated

How's that for a headline? OK, not really, but the eBay auction of our "these built reddit" powerbooks is going to be ending soon. Hurry and get your bids in now, or just wait to snipe it at the end.

If you're the one who keeps sniping me out of my Aliens collectible action figures, know that I'll find you. One day.

Incidentally, it might be fun to watch in the closing minutes (like that kiko auction!) so tune in at 2:01:17pm Eastern.

Thanks again for your support, be it through your casual interest, or through link-spamming the auction URL.

web 2.0 flashback

I was quite pleased to find a bit of Internet fluff I'd put together a while back resurface on the front page of reddit yesterday.

It was my proposal for a more web 2.0 reddit. Pity we never followed through with it. (Steve's always been adamant about making a blah blah useful blah blah site and not a trendy one) It's that kind of narrow mindedness that will keep him from ever getting an MBA.


Anyway, this eventually spiralled out of control -- not unlike a TAG MAELSTROM (usage note: it's important write this in all caps). The end result was this video (honest, I did work on reddit somtimes, too!). The style was obviously stolen from Colbert's The Wørd, but the inspiration was from a demo we saw one day in the Valley. I asked Aaron to write the slides and I had all the material I needed for the blowhard :)

To continue with the tradition of unearthing and recycling old content, meet Pierre Francois, Web 2.0 design consultant & guru (apologies if you already saw this -- a year ago):

chris doodles

Chris left behind the world of experimental atomic physics to hack on reddit. Sucker...

He's also the guy behind our nifty homebrew stat tools, which has earned him the nickname of "Statman" (like Batman, but not the lame 60s TV show version, more like the Christian Bale version). We're also collaborating on building the world's first functioning lightsaber -- it's not as clumsy or as random as a blaster, but an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

And by "collaborating," I mean I'm just telling him about how cool it would be, then he tells me about the limits of blah blah physics blah blah lasers blah blah. Hmpf.


Dr. Slowe did not get his PhD in graphic design.

jeremy doodles

Jeremy joined us shortly after we moved reddit out west with Wired. I asked him, along with Chris and Steve, to quickly doodle the alien with a sharpie on some printer paper.

Little did they know I'd be using it as an excuse to not do work.

So while they're busy finishing the rewrite, I'm displaying their artwork in a 120x40px logo. Here it is in high-rez scan for your viewing pleasure:


Drawing the alien freehand is harder than it looks.

Oh, and don't worry, I'm not going to try and sell the originals on eBay for charity.

a fresh start

I've never kept it a secret that I was the one who created our mascot (it's vital to my job security). But the guys are actually quite the doodlers themselves, so I thought we'd try the logo again with some new artists.

The added bonus of this is that I am off the hook for another week's worth of doodles (work).

Oh, and I can celebrate reuniting with my lost luggage, a mere 23 days later than desired. There I was trying to enjoy my first proper (read: Internet-less) vacation in a couple years and Alitalia decided I ought to buy an ill-fitting collection of Italian clothes. Really, those pants are a whole new kind of tight. Shudder.

Fortunately, I flew with my Jamglue shirt on, so I was already turning a few heads -- especially after wearing it for a solid thirty-six hours straight.



edit: I've just learned that Alitalia is actually Italian for "Lost luggage? Deal with it yourself -- you're in Italy now and we're all on vacation." Fancy that.

thanks for your help

This isn't just for those of you I pestered to vote up my reddit link (it wasn't just for the karma, honest). It was even submitted to digg.

I greatly appreciate all the attention this auction has already gotten thanks to the support of many anonymous users and a few not-so-anonymous ones (we're already just shy of $1000 at the time of this writing).

Valleywag did me a solid with a post mentioning the auction. The esteemed Scottkidder.com even blogged about it. Oh, Gizmodo gave a shoutout, too.

TechCrunch's Nick Gonzalez also showed us some love as well and even added my warning -- "Luck not included".

There wasn't much chatter on Valleywag or Scottkidder.com, but Techcrunch had a healthy bit of discussion. Sadly, I can't manage to comment on the article due to my own technical incompetence. If it had been working, I would have said the following:

to Francisco
I'm sorry to hear that. Thanks for for writing; I know this modest bit of fundraising will do little to end this terrible affliction, but I tell myself that every little bit helps.

to gettit
While I appreciate your cynicism, this decision was not motivated by a desire for personal exposure.

to Sam
You're right, we're not legends. You've undoubtedly read my disclaimer in the eBay listing: "Please hurry and bid before we fall even further into Internet obscurity!!!"

to Andrew
Yeah, I was in a bit of a rush and listed an AGP card as a PCI card. Whoops. He got his money back, but the blemish is still on my permanent record. Needless to say, I won't be shipping the wrong laptops ;-)

reddit: "particularly inane and dangerous"

Scott Butki of Blogcritics.org did a recent interview with Andrew Keen, author of The Cult Of The Amateur. He was asked the following:

I'm sure the readers of these sites, who are of all political, racial, ideological stripes, who often find the most popular debates are over controversial and contentious issues, would like to know what makes you sure your description of them is better than mine. Did you actually visit some of these sites and participate in them before dismissing them?

To which he responded:

I did look at Reddit, which is particularly inane and dangerous.

As you can tell, Mr. Keen is a big fan of what's going on at reddit ;-) I'm so proud.

Not only that, he's pretty scared of the "nightmare" that is Web 2.0. I can think of a lot of words I'd call it, but nightmare isn't one of them. Oh well, I'll let him speak for himself -- here's the email debate he had with David Weinberger.

In the meantime, I think I'm going to try to send him a shirt...


*pic ganked from WSJ.com

own the 2 laptops that started reddit.com

I just placed the two Powerbooks Steve and I used to start reddit on eBay. 100% of the proceeds are going to the American Brain Tumor Association, so I'd appreciate it if you passed along the link to this auction to any friends/family who like spending money.

If you happen to be in a VC-funded startup, I'd strongly recommend bidding on this pair of laptops. I guarantee it will at least double your already obscene valuation.

Even if you hate reddit, they would make a great addition to any burning effigy of our alien mascot -- think of the splendid YouTube video it'd make!

Thanks.

coming full circle (and cheerleading!)

(Picture taken by the remarkable photographer, Justin Hankins. Go get engaged and then have him photograph the wedding: www.justinhankins.com)

I was invited to click through some ppt slides at this year's U21 Conference, which was conveniently hosted at UVA this year. I'd attended the same conference three years earlier when it was in Singapore. Furthermore, it was on my first night there that I finally got the unbiased encouragement from a professor (Mark White) to try starting a startup with Steve. Until then, I'd only pitched my parents, who were incredibly supportive but ultimately unreliable. I could have told them I wanted to play professional rugby and they'd high-five me. You should see me run.

Anyway, this year's conference was about leadership and I feel like my hungover dog, beer-guzzling child, and cute kitten slides went over really well. I'm basing this on the number of Facebook friendship requests I made afterward that were not declined.

There is one thing I wish I'd mentioned though. Since I already hardly have much of a right to be sounding authorative about anything, I want to stress the one overarching thing that probably anyone could have told you, dot.com startup founder or not.

Look around and you'll likely find something that's wrong (or something you want to do right). It can be in technology, politics, society, it doesn't matter. Whatever it is -- just do it*

Rah, rah, rah.

I happened to be at a U21 Conference (and by that I mean at a bar the night before it began) when my switch flipped.

At this point, Steve and I already had a few casual conversations over grub or television about ideas he'd had. After a Waffle House epiphany with another friend, Jack, I'd ruled out law school and wanted to try starting a startup. I just didn't know what. I'd thought about putting salsa into a squeeze bottle (it'd be called Squeezalsa). Lucky for me, I was friends with Steve. He had much better ideas.

One of the better ones was what we ended up applying to YC with (and got rejected on, but that's another story). This is had in my head on the way to Singapore the Summer before my 4th year. I'd had an NYC internship lined up with Ogilvy PR when Professor White invited me to attend a "technopreneurship" symposium in Singapore as a member of the UVA team. And it'd be all expenses paid. The decision wasn't too hard to make, but it couldn't have been more fortunate.

Please forgive all the ellipses, typos, and the lack of punctuation; my well-ingrained US touch typing wasn't playing well with the keyboard layouts in Singapore so I get lazy.

This is the email I sent Steve on July 11, 2004:

hey bro, i'm in singapore at this technepreneurial seminar, and am basically spending a week learning how to create a tech start-up.

i spoke to Mark White (a professor in the comm school, the guy who took me to South Africa, and who recruited me to come here, as well as a generally good guy and technophile) over some drinks last nite, and pitched him on our idea...

from his feedback -- and let me remind you that he gets pitches every couple of months from students, and was very candid and honest with his thoughts, but basically said it was one of the best he's heard, period. Not only that, but he wants to be on the board of directors, and already knows some people to hit up for starting capital... I've got plenty of more details, but I am seriously considering putting off law school for this, but i need you, and we'll both need to be doing this full time for about a year to get it off the ground....

but the potential he saw was in the millions my friend...

we need to talk

seriously.

i am coming back the 20th so if we could have lunch around 1pm i could meet you whereever you'd like... let me know.

honestly, this is the kind of thing that could change our lives - and his motivation has really spurred me.

but i need you and the same kind of commitment.

Needless to say, I did talk him into it, and he did indeed wholly commit to a company essentially started in our college apartment living room.

Good thing it turned out OK ;-)


*alas, Nike does not pay me for that.

my next startup

I think the next startup Steve and I start should involve widget production. That way, we'd have a case study for every possible scenario.

Fun fact (a "Wikipedia fact"):
The etymology of the "widget" apparently goes back to Beggar on Horseback (1924), a play written by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. Apparently life in the widget factory is the "soul-deadening living" that is the alternative to a life with any artistic or spiritual value. Fun times.

taking down freakonomics like a bad case of the flu

I've been on vacation for a little while -- and included a sustained Internet abstinence -- so I've got some catching up to do.

In returning to my bloated inbox (mostly spam), I found a link Jeremy had sent from the Freakonomics blog. Apparently a frozen website is like a sick person, which is sick because reddit made it sick. (Idea for a new slogan: reddit, it's like Internet pestilence!) Anyway, it was neat to see the shoutout, so I'm returning the favor with a logo. You'll notice I just ripped off the apple/orange from their cover art (I must say, I've always really liked that cover -- in part because of how much I independently like apples and oranges and wonder how good a hybrid fruit of them would taste). I'm still a bit jet-lagged.

The offending blog entry posed an interesting question about whether or not public libraries could be started today (assuming they'd never existed). I always thought they had a terrible business model: "Sure, let's just let people read the books for free."

Incidentally, the discussion on reddit got quite good:

brennen
Regardless of what (some) publishers might think given the hypothetical situation, I doubt you'd find many authors who would want fewer people to have exposure and access to their work.

bsiviglia9
Are you suggesting the desires of the authors are often contrary to the desires of the publishers?

Oh, authors and publishers, why can't you two just get along...

a great day for user-generated content

The new shirts have been selling pretty well. We've even gotten some photos from satisfied customers.

Wearing reddit shirts will indeed cause random, profound salutations.

We even have fancy photos that are as blurry as they are exciting!

not safe for scandinavia

Thought I'd share an interesting email convo I just had with a friend:

her:

trying to decide btw. the concert in finland 5/8, sweden 7/8, or norway 8/8....hmmm. what's closest to madrid? yeah, i suck at geography...

me:

here's a geeky mnemonic I use: you know about NSFW (Not Safe For Work) material online, right? Those 3 are in the same order from west to east (Norway, Sweden, Finland)

Whenever you think about Scandinavia, just think about porn. Problem solved.

Although this still leaves the meaning of the "W" unanswered. Now there's room for Scandinavia to finally accept Wallis and Futuna (yeah, I looked this up on Wikipedia -- this territory is the only "W" country in the world).

Got any other geography mnemonics you'd like to share? The U.S.A. doesn't often test well for this sort of thing, so we could use the help.

this blog has jumped the shark cat

I never thought it would come to this, but it was late last night and I wasn't quite ready to go to sleep (yes this is what I do on a typical Friday night).

Few folks know that I own a cat that looks like Kaiser Wilhelm II. This is a very disconcerting thing, even for non-German-history majors.

So naturally, this led to my LOLCAT attempt (if only I could find a Pickelhaube he could wear like a bukkit):

I've also evidently hit a new Internet low now that I've posted a picture of my cat online. Forgive me.

almost spoke too soon, phone now unlocked

Guess no one at AT&T/Cingular had read the earlier post about this (shocker) or they're just that considerate. Here's the confirmation email, imagine it in what must have been 18pt font:

*** SIM Unlock request REVIEWED and APPROVED by Subsidy Unlock Group IMEI: (###############) / SIM unlock is: (################) Emailed code and instructions back to: (#####@reddit.com)****

To make sure you have the correct code for your phone, power on phone and type *#06# this will display the IMEI, or you can pull the battery out of the phone and the IMEI will be on the sticker.

* The customer only has five (5) tries to unlock the phone.
* If this process is unsuccessful five times in a row, the phone will be permanently locked to the Cingular network.

BlackBerry 8800

For the device to display the software version, select "Options" then "About"

1. Insert Cingular SIM into device

2. Power phone on and Turn off the radio (Turn Wireless Off option) VERY IMPORTANT.

3. Select "Options"

4. Scroll down and select "SIM Card"

5. Type "MEPD"

6. Type "MEP2"

7. Enter the Unlock Code

8. Press enter

9. Reboot device. Device is now unlocked.

zenter bought by google, not bad for a winter

I think this has already sufficiently been blagged about, but now that we're free to talk about it, I wanted to congratulate the Zenter team. I couldn't help but smile when I saw this on my visit to zenter.com:


I'd missed their presentation at demo day by only a few minutes, but I heard great things. Then I saw Paul use it to give his talk at StartupSchool (the first time, I believe, that Paul Graham has used slides in a presentation). Next thing I know, there's a glowing Newsweek article about the then newest batch of startups.

(great pic)

And sure enough, here they are after a super industrious winter and change, joining the Goog.

Very impressive, guys.

OK, I think I've done my YC promotion for the week. Back to today's logo...

**Forgot these guys were in the 2007 Winter Founders Program. Silly me.

fresh reddit gear

Just before we sold out of our last batch of shirts, I'd doodled up some new ideas for designs. The new release is finally available at our store. As you can tell from some of the pictures, we desperately need someone with a better camera and no shame to model a couple of the new shirts.

The folks over at Vogue have better things to do than help us with our shirts, so we did what we could. Two of the designs were also inspired by user suggestions. I'll let you guess what one of them was:

BTW, shipping is included in the $16 price -- none of that $.99 pricing BS. How 'bout that?

PS. If you were one of the many redditors who submitted a pic, since we've decommissioned a few versions, I'll figure out some kind of display for all your pics so you can hang on to that piece of Internet fame. From now on, you can also refer to your shirt as "limited edition".

idaho's portugal no more!

... or is it California's Canada? Washington's Mexico? I can't remember.

But it doesn't matter, Oregon now has it's own reddit.

It's something we built with the folks at Oregonlive.com. And by "we", I really mean Jeremy. We turned it on earlier this week and it's been fun watching their readers use reddit to vote on the news that's important to them.

Case in point, behold the hottest story at the time of this writing:


Great things happen when you let readers decide the news.

Idaho is gonna be so jealous when it finds out.

getting at&t/cingular to unlock your cellphone (a howto)

First rule: Don't tell them you're doing it to switch carriers.

I made this mistake on my first call. Heh.

The reply I got was a curt, "In that case, we cannot unlock your phone for you."

Barring the conundrum that I evidently don't really own the phone I've already purchased from them, this gave me hope. There must be some cases where they "can" unlock it.

A quick Google search revealed that they're happy to oblige if it means you're traveling abroad and want your hardware to mingle with some foreign SIM cards. Called back, mentioned a pending trip abroad, and now I'm getting emailed that unlock code. Phew. Fortunately I didn't have to list my reasons for travel, destinations, and window/aisle-seat preference.

And if you're looking for some strategies to get refunded on those overage charges, I even photoshopped the Cingular logo for that entry.

Incidentally, here's today's header! (click for the explanation)

my spam domain

Somewhere during the meltdown of Registerfly.com, an absolutely terrible registrar, I got to see my beloved kn0thing.com reduced to a landing page with a smiling blonde and text-ads for horror flicks, halloween, and a Wayans brothers movie.

Even considering the last one, it could have been worse. A man's vanity domain is all he's got going for him, imagine if it were reported on Valleywag that I liked the Wayans brothers.

I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for a friend IMing me about it -- she thought the Scary Movie 4 reference seemed unlike me.

Plus, Steve's the only blond friend I have.

Anyway, thanks to some friendly folks at Enom (I'm looking at you, Álvaro) I got my domains back today. And I even added some more random content that you can almost guarantee will never get updated.

conversation with a spammer

Yeah, it's the weekend.

4:01:03 PM spammer: hi
4:01:09 PM me: hello
4:01:18 PM me: i'm sorry, i'm not sure i know who this is
4:01:19 PM spammer: nice to meet you!
4:01:34 PM spammer: I am Harry from China
4:01:38 PM spammer: you ?
4:01:52 PM me: George from China
4:02:07 PM me: fancy that!
4:02:41 PM spammer: You are chinese ?
4:02:52 PM spammer: good
4:02:58 PM me: Oddly enough, no, but I live in China. I'm Armenian.
4:03:09 PM spammer: which city are you in ?
4:03:19 PM me: So my Chinese isn't very good yet ^^
4:03:24 PM me: Shanghai
4:03:27 PM spammer: ok
4:03:37 PM me: It's nice to meet friends online.
4:03:47 PM spammer: Do you like Shanghai?
4:04:45 PM me: Yes, it's very nice. People have been very friendly to me.
4:04:53 PM me: I'm trying to make it to the USA.
4:05:01 PM me: But I only made it half way
4:05:22 PM spammer: hope you can success in future
4:05:51 PM me: Many thanks! keke
4:06:09 PM spammer: you are welcome
4:06:31 PM spammer: you work in shanghai or do business ?
4:07:04 PM me: I don't work much right now. I need a job
4:07:18 PM spammer: oh
4:07:28 PM me: *_*
4:07:48 PM spammer: You can find good job in shanghai
4:08:15 PM me: I have lots of skillz.
4:08:24 PM me: My friends all say that I am much l33t
4:08:35 PM me: And I totally pwn at Starcraft - LOL!
4:08:43 PM spammer: haha
4:09:02 PM spammer: good
4:09:31 PM spammer: so it's just a piece of cake for you to fine a job
4:10:20 PM me: I wish. I can't eat cake. Allergic
4:10:37 PM spammer: ;)
4:10:37 PM me: My skin gets massive bumps and I die if eat too much cake
4:10:54 PM spammer: ok
4:10:54 PM me: I do have a kitten. I like cats. I take pictures of mine.
4:11:13 PM spammer: very good
4:11:23 PM spammer: i like cats too, they are very cute
4:11:54 PM me: much cuteness
4:12:10 PM me: i have a friend in USA who collects cat photos
4:12:23 PM me: he has told me he also has a fortune of his grandfather
4:12:30 PM me: but he needs help getting it to Mexico
4:12:42 PM me: i want to help, but what can i do from China?
4:12:56 PM spammer: yes i understand
4:13:11 PM spammer: Do you have plan back USA?
4:13:12 PM me: He needs $10,000 USD
4:13:22 PM me: but I only have 5,000
4:13:30 PM me: And that's if I sell my cats
4:13:46 PM me: (I'd rather just eat them myself)
4:14:09 PM spammer: hehe
4:14:24 PM spammer: yes
4:14:36 PM me: You seem like a honest person , yes?
4:14:51 PM spammer: i am
4:15:15 PM me: i thought so
4:15:27 PM spammer: :D
4:15:35 PM me: we can get this fortune
4:15:43 PM spammer: ok
4:15:59 PM spammer: You seem like a honest person too
4:16:43 PM me: ! i have much luck today
4:16:55 PM spammer: wow
4:17:03 PM spammer: what luck
4:17:25 PM me: yes!!
4:17:48 PM spammer: mind tell me ?
4:17:50 PM me: how can we do this? can you wire me the 5,000? we split the fortune in half
4:18:08 PM spammer: ok
4:18:30 PM spammer: :P
4:18:49 PM spammer: when i have 5000, i give you
4:19:29 PM me: there is no time
4:19:35 PM me: this is a serious matter my friend
4:20:02 PM spammer: yes i know
4:20:25 PM spammer: but i only have RMB200 now
4:20:40 PM me: i don't think you understand.
4:20:43 PM me: this man will die.
4:20:52 PM me: now is not the time to be concerned with petty things like money.
4:21:02 PM spammer: how?
4:22:30 PM me: he has a greedy uncle who wants to take it.
4:22:41 PM me: the uncle has already killed his father -- he's sure of it
4:22:44 PM me: and married his mother
4:22:49 PM me: much is bad.
4:23:13 PM spammer: yes
4:23:18 PM spammer: very bad
4:24:26 PM me: there must be a way to help
4:34:11 PM me: hello?

we value your feedback

See, someone really does read those forms you send into the blackhole of "feedback". Here's a gem from the logo change on Friday:

The olympic logo is hideous and hurts my eyes and brain. Please take it down!

Some people cannot appreciate the aesthetic mastery of a highly paid design firm. Admit it, the rest of us haven't got any taste.

Nevertheless, I still took it down this morning and restored the default logo. Maybe next week I'll solicit ideas from random people just like the BBC did -- what could go wrong?