flashback to a startup school presentation i gave back in 07

Kevin Hale of Wufoo (the form of choice for FeedbackFail) just published a slightly belated write-up of a presentation I gave back at Startup School 07. OK, so it's more than slightly belated, but I'll take it!

Read the article, check out the slides, or listen to the audio -- or do all three at the same time.

Thanks for the great review, Kevin. I must admit that I've been asked more than a few times since to give that presentation: The [Abridged] Story of Reddit.com (Or, how to build a popular website without ever being on TechCrunch.) But I think you've nailed the crux of it:

I think that if you’re not careful and that if you’re doing this solely for the money, that you’ll easily lose one of the few motivations that sustains anyone through anything difficult : love. [...] Don’t take yourself so seriously. A startup can and should be fun. It doesn’t have to be a 24/7 party in your pants fun, but you should at least be smiling a lot.

Great. Now no one is going to want to hear my presentation anymore ;)

digg is developing their own /recommended page

The Guardian's Zoe Margolis tracked down Kevin Rose before a Diggnation meetup for a quick interview. In it, he reveals some interesting work digg is doing for their next release:

We're creating algorithms that take a look at what you've dug and compare it to other people, inside the system, in real time. We have this working on our staging servers right now - it's not something that we've launched publicly - but essentially, when you Digg an item you're agreeing with that item and all those other people who dug it. So let's say you're Digg number 4,000 on something: who are those other 3,999 people you agreed with? What we're doing with the math behind the scenes is we're saying 'OK, you agree with all these other people, what else are they finding out there that you might like? That you might also find interesting? So we're working on ways to surface those stories - to find quality content before it becomes popular - but also introduce you to new people based on what you've been Digging."

We've been tweaking our recommendations page for over the last two years and come to realize that serving real-time accurate recommendations is not a trivial task, so I'm quite curious to see what KR and co. have come up with.

Granted, their development team is more than an order of magnitude larger than ours -- they've got the brain quantity to pull off something cool.

reddit aliens sighted all over web 2.0 expo

Taylor McKnight (Sched) and Anthony Volodkin (The Hype Machine) Aaron Avery (IMarketServices) snapped this collection of photos featuring reddit alien bobbleheads all over the recent San Francisco event. I have yet to go to a Web 2.0 expo, so perhaps I should be feeling jealous of our mascot, yet I'm not...

OK, maybe just a little jealous.

The alien does love to get its drink on. And play Rock Band.

View the rest of the collection.

redditors take their votes seriously

I love seeing messages like this. Here's a roomie who really cares:

Dearest Ben,

I’m sorry I clicked arrows on reddit.com without switching over to my account. I hope that your reccomendations aren’t negatively affected as a result of my aarow-clicking.

Sincerely,

Your roomie.

Oh, and apparently we're one half of the equation to end the world. Funny, I always thought the other half was nuclear war.

you're curious about yourweek, are ya?

Unless you're in a focus group or a public television exec, you haven't seen it yet. Don't fret, we haven't either. but we're hoping the pilot goes online by the end of this week.

Current not to be confused with the Al Gore project, wrote a nice piece on Your Week. And it even has this nifty synopsis:

But the producers aim to court both core and new viewers by spiking intelligent and even-handed, if occasionally counterintuitive, public-affairs features with humor and pointed commentary, perhaps bridging the gap between the NewsHour and, say, The Daily Show.

The pilot, for example, includes a straightforward report on efforts to increase voter turnout among Latinos in California and a lighter news story on why Toyota Priuses might be harder on the environment than Hummers — featuring Cottle, a Prius owner. A feature on the latest version of the hyperviolent video game Grand Theft Auto includes an interview with a Newsweek tech writer and plenty of green-screened carnage.

The show closes with an extended riff by the acerbic Christopher Hitchens, who gives a colorfully contemptuous take on the presidential candidates and their spouses.

The strong opinions and humor are meant to mirror those traits that thrive online; indeed, the format of the entire show, from its modular two- to four-minute reports to its web-influenced video windows and graphics, such as interspersed “loading” clock animations, is designed to signal its hybrid nature.

new from breadpig: feedback fail - scouring the dregs of the internet for the best feedback emails ever written

If you've run a website for any period of time (and dared to include a feedback email link/address somewhere on your site) then you know what I'm talking about.

While the majority of your feedback will be tasteful and normal, every now and then you'll get something that makes you either laugh or cringe, shudder, and curl up into a fetal position. FeedbackFail is a blog to collect the best of these from website owners all over the web. Take a look, vote on a few submissions, and don't hesitate to submit your own (hell, it's free advertising if it gets selected, right?)

This is the latest of my breadpig projects and the only one that aspires to be full of fail.

I've already gotten some good feedback on the mascot. Shirts to come...

just picked up my copy of world of world of warcraft

Thank you, reddit. And thank you ONN -- America's finest news network.

'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft'

an interview with tivate, with penguin-based inspiration!

I took an unacceptably long amount of time to get back to Justin Hernandez of tivate with my A to his Q, but our email convo is now online. (Even despite my tardiness, he generously offered me beer on my next trip to Hawaii!) Apparently there's an alien social revolution going on.

Hmm, I guess I had it coming. When you're done finding inspiration from a penguin, the Rob Malda interview is certainly worth a look.

yourweek.reddit got a new look and is fielding questions, it is -your week- after all

Erik [hueypriest] is fielding questions about YourWeek on the newly redesigned YourWeek.reddit. With the pilot hitting the Internet tomorrow, it seemed like a good time to assemble an FAQ and explain the show we hope will get picked up and become a part of your weekly viewing routine.

Here's a sample, but read the rest and submit your own:

toxicvarn90 asks:
How do you balance the type of submissions posted each weak?

Will you use stuff from the main front page?

Oh and what software will you guys use to edit?

hueypriest responds:
For the pilot we achieved a perfect balance of stories using a proprietary mix of Ant Colony Optimization and Josephson's voltage gauge modeling. It might be a bit different if we were doing a show every week.

On any given week, we might have stuff from the front page, some deep cuts, and even some stuff that may not have directly been submitted to reddit (if such things exist). No hard rules, except that we want to do smart stories that haven't been done elsewhere and redditors make that possible.

I believe the editors at WETA are using both Avid Xpress and Final Cut Pro.

the story of the lost alien bobblehead in ny is revealed -- let's talk full-length feature, disney

It took me a pathetically long amount of time to finally get this online, but I'd lost track of the email. Tim, known on reddit as hellotim doodled this strip shortly after the Toronto drankkit event.

This is my chance to belatedly praise him and point you to his blog. Fortunately, we did in fact reunite with the lost bobblehead and then were joined by hundreds of its clones (which are still for sale).


If Disney does come calling, Tim, I'm not going to let them manhandle the alien -- we'll make sure this is a Pixar project. And we'll need a creative director*...



*I don't actually know what one does, but it sounds like something that'd be right up your alley.

just five days until yourweek is released...

They're busy in the editing room wrapping up the pilot of YourWeek. I joined the production team over the Memorial Day weekend in the D.C. studio as they taped and watched a television show being born.

Whereas I just sat behind my laptop, the crew was in a seemingly constant state of motion -- cameras getting moved, adjusted, teleprompters scrolling with text, different takes from different angles, make-up -- I had no idea how much work goes into a thirty minute show. The set is spartan: table, chairs, two coffee mugs for our two hosts, Rich Lowry and Michelle Cottle. Behind them is a set of three massive green screens. And what better use for those three mammoths than to play GTA 4 on them?

Thankfully, no one flipped out during the taping.

michael ian black gets on reddit, has his best week ever, then blogs about it, and reddit becomes significantly more relevant

And that, ladies in gentlemen, is how reddit became famous -- Hollywood famous.

Michael, I'm glad you handled those surly commenters with such aplomb. You're a man to be respected, no, honored -- with a statue.

I'm not going to help build that statue, but I would like to mail you a reddit alien bobblehead. It works just like any other bobblehead (read: it bobbles) except it's special because it looks like our mascot. I suspect few people in L.A. have ever seen such a thing. Your celebrity friends will be in awe of this modern marvel.

You can host dinner parties around it. Or whatever it is celebrities do (cocaine & hooker parties?)

All I ask is that you get a photo of Major Quimby holding the bobblehead. He must also be standing in the express line of a supermarket carrying a basket of more than 15 items -- all turnips or turnip-based products.

reddit-powered shaving cream democracy

Vote for the superior shaving cream. Seriously. It's a reddit-powered poll on TheUpgrader, along with a variety of other hot-lists, including "product" and contrast collar shirts. Admit it, you're curious to see the hottest contrast collar shirt.

This is just the kind of thing we never would have dreamed up (Steve doesn't even shave yet).

Our administrative tools for the 'reddit self-serve polling widget' (that's the shortest name we could come up with) have been floating around CondéNet for a while now and I'm constantly surprised with what they've produced.

The reddit alien and GQ may not appear to be likely partners, but here they are. Well, the alien isn't anywhere to be found -- it's there in spirit.

hacker news reviews the reddit redesign

I had to ask. I really enjoy the Hacker News community, so I knew there'd be some good feedback. The discussion was fairly evenly split between positive and negative, but Paul Graham won the day with the best comment:

I think you should change the name; "reddit" is ok, but there are still a lot of good names available.

Nicely done, Paul.

all hail rich, guru of redesigns

One more thing about the redesign: Rich has asked that we send your feedback to a reddit.uservoice page for better analysis.

It's like a features.reddit that's been designed to be a features.reddit!

2 things I never thought I'd see: xkcd in the nytimes and microsoft building a delicious-clone (why?)

In case you missed it, the New York Times business section wrote a nice piece on Mr. Munroe's brilliant webcomic.

And if that wasn't enough of a mindjob, Microsoft is rolling out a social bookmarking site. Someone please throw a chair at whomever dreamed this one up.

They should have just acquired furl and saved themselves the trouble.

after almost 3 years, reddit gets a redesign

And Mashable was there on the scene just before we pushed it live.

Adam Ostrow writes:

While I’ve long thought Reddit often offers a more appealing story selection than Digg, its interface has long been so Spartan that it hurts (my eyes!). The new look definitely makes the site easier to navigate, read, and customize, without losing the simplicity that Reddit old-timers appreciate.

Steve wrote a blog entry outlining the new features and thanking our homeboy (and CSS-fiend) Rich White for his invaluable help getting this redesign together.

Of the 5 of us who work on reddit, I'm the only one who has a copy of Photoshop, so I end up being "designer." That said, I'm well aware that I'm not a proper web designer (and can't call myself one without laughing a little). But Rich is. You should see what he can do with some CSS, an HTML file, and a couple hours. It's like he's a web-McGuyver.

Thanks, Rich -- you complete me.

a bad sign for hillary at bwi

Maybe I was wrong about the signs in BWI not having a sense of humor...

ROFLCon video: the LOLcats panel I moderated

Respectably French did something uncharacteristically French (sorry, Antoine) and got this online ahead of schedule. I also mentioned it on the breadpig blog, but wanted you all to see it, too. The Guardian even wrote about it.

I had a fantastic group of panelists, who made my job very easy. Even if you're not a student of LOLspeak, I think you owe it to yourself to watch this for your own cultural edification.

And notice the slick (and shameless) LOLmagnetz promotion I sneak in there...

shameless yourweek promotion on reddit

Yes, we were pleased with yesterday's buzz, but I didn't think it'd hurt to run a house ad as well. With provocative gradients!

reddit this ad

yourweek ftw: the internet apparently likes pbs-produced, reddit-powered TV news

We announced something very cool today on the reddit blog. We're producing a television news show with PBS that is powered by reddit -- it's called YourWeek. All the content for the show will come from the reddit front page and from the YourWeek reddit (for meta discussions about the show).

We're finishing filming for the pilot this weekend, but wanted to get the word out in order to pull together some choice comments and even get some help remixing the theme song.

The pilot should go online June 6th; I can assure you that a D-Day anniversary deployment was totally coincidental.

Seems we're not the only ones excited about this, here's the latest tally of press hits from Erik (a fellow redditor and the guy running web production on their end). To quote Borat: "very nice."

http://valleywag.com/392393/wireds-reddit-launches-tv-show-your-week
http://newteevee.com/2008/05/21/reddit-users-get-their-own-tv-show/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-9949715-36.html
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2008/05/21/social-media-service-reddit-gets-a-tv-show/3863
http://thestandard.com/news/2008/05/21/classy-diggnation-reddit-launches-tv-show-pbs
http://i-stuff.blogspot.com/2008/05/your-week-reddit-powered-television.html
http://www.techmeme.com/080521/p100#a080521p100
http://www.profy.com/2008/05/21/yourweek-on-reddit-and-pbs/
http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/21/the-classy-diggnation-reddit-launches-a-tv-show-with-pbs/
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/pbs_taps_wisdom_of_the_reddit_crowd
http://vcsandangels.com/blog/?p=3948
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9949715-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware
http://www.podcastingnews.com/2008/05/21/reddit-pbs-intro-user-generated-weekly-television-show/
http://www.brentcsutoras.com/2008/05/21/reddit-and-pbs-launch-yourweek/
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/05/21/reddit-hits-the-vids-with-yourweek
http://culturite.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/reddit-headlines-to-be-magically-transformed-into-tv-news/
http://www.webtvwire.com/meet-yourweek-a-weekly-web-tv-show-following-the-latest-headlines-at-reddit/
http://www.winextra.com/2008/05/21/elite-tech-news-the-pbs-version/
http://www.reelpopblog.com/2008/05/reddit-pbs-laun.html
http://www.inquisitr.com/a-reddit-powered-tv-show-id-like-to-see-that

And yes, we even made digg -- though I really don't see the comparison:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Is_Reddit_s_New_YourWeek_TV_Program_a_Diggnation_Ripoff

.77% clickthru rate on an ad for zombie alien bobbleheads

Well, that's the effect I was going for. They're not actually zombie bobbleheads.

It was quite a feat to get it under 30K (our limit), so I'm pleased it pulled .77%

I like designing ads, but I wish there were a way for robots to do it -- they're infinitely superior. Especially if they were as anthropomorphic as R2D2 while they did it...

the new york times likes it when our geeky barbarians storm conde nast empire (presumably not to bring about its downfall)

Reporting on the recent acquisition of Ars Technica, David Carr even gives us a little shoutout:

True to form, the captains of the Condé Nast Death Star have not meddled with kids from Reddit — it was founded by a couple of students at the University of Virginia — any more than they have told Ms. Wintour what cover models to put on Vogue.

It's true, we remain rather unmeddled-with, but I wonder if he's talking about the first or second Death Star. Can I be Chewbacca?

And when do we stop being kids? I just turned 25 after all. It must be Steve's boyish good looks...

breadpig project: one roflaptop per child

Here's the latest breadpig project, getting my XO laptop (unusable with my ogreish hands) signed by the meme-makers of the Internet at ROFLCon and auctioning it on eBay for OLPC. There's even a trailer to prove it...

Or if you don't need proof, just go right to the eBay listing and bid or at the very least, email/IM it to all of your friends and family

Oh, and here's a photo of the XO laptop in Randall Munroe's embrace.

That's one lucky laptop...

reddit alien + rocket sled = fun!

Kevin Jordan had a dream. He wanted to destroy a reddit alien bobblehead using the power of rocket science. Happy to oblige, we sent him one.

He's just posted the video on his blog, I Dream in Code. If you're a fan of rocket sleds, or watching reddit aliens getting blown up (or burned), there's something there for you!

scoble's been reading programming.reddit (and getting a redesign?)

Seems Mr. Scoble has been spending some time on programming.reddit and highlights some juicy comments about the latest dose of Ballmer.

The reddit headline reads: Awkward moment for Steve Ballmer at the Microsoft MVP summit:"How many of you use Yahoo search as your default?"

To which redditor, sirbyt, simply responded:

Does Steve Ballmer have non-awkward moments?

Well played, sirbyt.

But why do I feel like the last person to know about Scoble's redesign?. Maybe that's just the kind of thing I need to boost my traffic numbers and bump me into the ranks of top tier web2.0 bloggers...


On second thought, no, that's just grotesque.

interviewed by wired's marketing guy

Conflict of interest? Of course not.

Last week, Jim Hopkinson sat down with me for his podcast, The Hopkinson Report (download and listen) and we chatted about reddit: its history, community, and the redesign.

Chris joined us for the second half of the podcast (coming on Wednesday) and even confesses the secret to beating the reddit hotness algorithm.

Oh, and there's some thought-provoking Mister Splashy Pants discussion in part II as well. Did you know he has his own Wikipedia page? That's one hell of a whale...

the independent covers reddit's helen thomas "floral thank you"

Does this mean it's a legitimate news story now?

I know reddit wasn't the only community heartened to see her line of questioning, so it'd be refreshing to see this get some more attention. The news media loves talking about itself, right? (or reporting live on breaking trapped pelican stories) The real key will be getting a photo of Thomas with the reddit alien bobblehead and a really perplexed look on her face.

Now if only we could pack a few more journalists like her into the White House press corps...

a clip from roflcon - starring xkcd!

I got the chance to moderate and speak on a panel at ROFLCon this past weekend in Cambridge, MA. In the midst of relentlessly plugging reddit, getting superstar geek signatures for my ROFLaptop and handing out LOLmagnetz, I came face to face with Internet legends (can I call them legends? To hell with it, I am). Pics of me with Tron Guy to come...

One of the highlights for me came on my panel, INCUBATING THE MINDVIRUS: MEME INFRASTRUCTURES, hosted by the moderator-extraordinaire, Anil Dash. And yes, he was rocking his infamous NYTimes-photographed Goatse shirt.

He asked the panel for some significant moments when you realized your meme (in my case, the whole reddit-thing) really took off. I didn't have a good answer for us, but there were two fantastic memes I saw at their humble beginnings on reddit -- one was even in attendance...

(Thanks to Doomeru of Resigned Gamer for the video)

And if that weren't enough, here's an excerpt from a recent IM convo we had:

5:06:03 PM xkcd-dude: I hope you aren't hurt
5:06:13 PM xkcd-dude: but I've added a line to my hosts file
5:06:28 PM xkcd-dude: so reddit resolves to localhost
5:06:36 PM xkcd-dude: where this page is served: http://xkcd.com/no/

Hurt? Randall, I'm in love.

here I am looking longingly into the eyes of Randall Munroe
pic from Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

In case you're curious, the other meme I hinted at is Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame, but I'm cooking up a separate blog entry just for him.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend. Our ROFLhosts did a masterful job and I'm counting on them to repeat next year. Consider me signed up. If you didn't make it this year, the videos should be floating around. I've got nearly all the footage from the LOLspeak panel I moderated -- just need to find the right techno soundtrack to loop in the background.

flowers for helen thomas: the reddit community pitches in to thank a journalist for, well, doing her job

This is really quite remarkable. What started with a post on reddit linking to the video of Helen Thomas hammering Dana Perino on the Bush administration's torture history, evolved into a self post on reddit where the community spontaneously decided to thank Thomas.

And within a couple days, redditors raised $4,100 for flowers and various other tokens of appreciation. They even setup a wiki to keep track of it all. Now the flowers have already started pouring in and we at team reddit are sending over a bobblehead with signed note.

Not to be outdone, the alien also wanted to send her some flowers, hence today's logo.

breaking: the first reddit marriage proposal

Karen's self-post rocketed up the front page. We're still waiting to see his response (to quote redditor, SeanLazer: "I'm dying to find out which arrow he clicked!").

Here's her splendid first comment to accompany the self-post:

On Bended Keyboard

I'm here because of one man : Eric Fullenbaum is a great guy. I love him, and he loves me. But he also has a love for the net, and that's why I'm here - because I know this is where he'll be!

The story: Eric is my boyfriend of six years, a classic nerd: a fantastic American guy who loves to build things through his MAC, who has code-happy fingers and has taught me loads about the Web, blogging and sites like Reddit.com, Joel on Software and how to appreciate a great Apple!

Unbeknownst to me, he would use the one liners describing the articles aggregated in Reddit.com to engage me in discussion but also to tease me and lure me into figuring out who sourced them! In spite of working in the digital space and thinking I am no web greenhorn, he outsmarted me at every turn till one of his friends helped me out! I have since become a fan myself and now do the same to my family and friends!!

More than a year ago, I was relocated to Amsterdam and Eric stayed in London. Being in a long distance relationship is hard and not for the faint-hearted. However, we keep at it and he uses Reddit to keep the flame alive whilst I use Digg and Kottke to fan it.

Six years on, the flames are still burning brightly and we both know that we will spend our lives together, with marriage on the cards. But Eric has thus far failed to bend his knee and play his hand, though I know it's time to lay the cards on the table. And so, using the very medium to which he turned me on, I am now going "all in".

Eric Fullenbaum - will you take a nerd widow and make her your wife.

Translation: Will you marry me?

one roflaptop per child

ROFLCON has been going well thus far. I'm feeling a bit starstruck after having met both Leeroy Jenkins and Tron Guy within the first thirty minutes.

I'm wearing two hats here at the conference (not literally) and I'm also working on a new breadpig project called One ROFLaptop Per Child. It basically involves me conning my fellow speakers into signing my XO laptop to auction on eBay and give the proceeds right back to OLPC. The next picture you see of this laptop will have a lot of geek celebrity signatures on it (including the Firefox!)

how can a website with only 5 employees (reddit) have leaks?

I have no idea how those new reddit UI screenshots surfaced on Brent Csutoras' blog...

Bonus! Even Valleywag thought the redesign was newsworthy.

Given that there are only five of us, you'd think it wouldn't be too hard to figure out, but we've been too busy working on the redesign (read: rehearsing our video-reply to the below video).

As you can tell from this carefully orchestrated company-wide lip sync, digg has a metric shit ton of employees. I don't know how you do it, Jay. If I were wearing a hat right now, I'd tip it.

I can spin around in my chair and see everyone I work with.

In fact, it lets me cheat off their screens when we play StarCraft*.

Digg Dubb: Groove Is In The Heart from Trammell on Vimeo.

*That's not true. I don't need to cheat. Unless I'm playing David. But he'd still win anyway. Moral of this story? Early base expansion is crucial to victory.

friday afternoon high jinx at the reddit offices

Thanks to the good doctor, Chris Slowe, for taking these photos.

We'd always pass this innocuous set of signs on the way up to our floor and one day the reddit alien just couldn't resist any longer...







I think I'd better bring over a new sign and an alien bobblehead to the good folks at Cake Financial. It's a really great name.

updated the adium reddit alien dock icon

Whoops, I spoke too soon. I'd uploaded a slighty-out-of-date version of the dock icon. The new one is pending approval, so don't go updating your Adium quite yet. Sorry about that. (This be old news...)

A recent email from HunterTV prompted me to update the reddit alien dock icon I'd made a while back for Adium -- the greatest IM client in the world, ever.

There aren't any major changes, but the IM notification animation is more dramatic (look how excited the alien is!) and there's now a jolly speech bubble behind the alien when it's just chillin'.

   

the alien turns 3

Whoops, I almost forgot. The alien turned three today. I need to add some more candles to that cake.

Its biographicon entry is still a work in progress -- you should help, since Wikipedia doesn't want the alien's bio.

If you need another online friend, here's the reddit alien facebook account (it says it's me, but that's only because Mark Sugarmountain made me change it from "reddit mascot"), LinkedIn account, and facebook brand page. That last one made me shudder a little bit.

Oh, and if you want to relive all the past reddit logo doodles -- check out redditalien.com.

reddit hiring explosion! we're up to 5

The ketralnis alien is born. This was really overdue; sorry it took so long, David. He's actually been here kicking our ass at the office, kicking our asses in StarCraft, for a while now.

Folks are often quite surprised when I tell them that reddit only has five people working on it. I'm not quite sure how to take it ("Have we become that mammoth and soulless or do we just tend to assume that large websites must necessarily have a large staff?")

Craiglist is the perfect example of a dynamite employee-to-user ratio. Someone has already calculated it, I'm sure, but I'm going to guess that it's something like 1 employee for every 1 trillion users. There, you can quote me on that. That's what we're aspiring to.

We're still nowhere near that ratio, but hopefully this will help people understand why we haven't implemented tagging yet.

why nerds are unpopular (and that's ok) -- explained by south park

Paul Graham has a great essay on the subject (the pictures alone make it worth the read). It was probably the only thing I'd read of his before applying to Y Combinator (Steve was the true PG fan) and I'd always been meaning to write something of an addendum to this essay.

Then a few months back I saw this South Park episode and it said everything I wanted to, but with Abraham Lincoln -- one of our homely-est Presidents and arguably our greatest.

jimmy wales now my [facebook] friend

What, this doesn't merit a blog entry?

Last week I wrote about a shoutout in a Valleywag (yes, Owen poked back). In it, I recounted bumping into Jimmy Wales at a party a little while back. And pinned him! (with a reddit pin)

Apparently he remembered, too, and I wasn't just having another bad trip. Say what you want about Jimmy, he's a great facebook-friender.

This should be very encouraging news to startups with their logo on 1" buttons. Those who have yet to jump on the pin bandwagon are already way behind every emo band and all the startups who want to be successful.

That VC funding isn't going to spend itself. OnceInchRound is the preferred button supplier of reddit and breadpig. I was not paid to type that, but I kinda wish I were...

redditAll.com traffic takes down MentalFloss.com

That's a bald-faced lie. But hopefully they'll get the site back online and you can read that stirring interview I promised. If you just can't wait, Here's the GoogleCache of it.

Then you should buy one of their t-shirts so they can afford some new servers.

mental floss asks the questions you've always wanted me to answer

David over at Mental Floss interviewed me via email last week and the results are on the Creatively Speaking blog ahead of schedule. I knew all those bribes would finally pay off.

Take a 5 minute vacation and find out my answers to these questions and more!

I guess i should lead with the absolute most important question–the one on every reader’s mind: what’s the deal with the little reddit cartoon character? Is there a story behind him/her/it? A name? A history worth sharing?

If you could have lunch with any dead person from history, who would it be and why? And it better not be the alien dude.

Oh, and I even got the chance to plug breadpig. Hurray. If you like breadpig tees (or even if you hate them), you'll love the tees over at Mental Floss. Don't miss the Lady Macbeth hand soap tee -- just don't wear it to bed.

part of a campaign to get reddit alien bobbleheads on every desk in the world

It took a bit of magic (and grayscaling) to get this animated .gif under the 30K limit, but here's my newest ad for reddit bobbleheads.

Someone already reddit-ed it with the headline "What the? This is a weird add." I can only suspect TH322 meant "ad" and that reddit isn't exhibiting some bizarre adding behavior.

So what's the verdict -- have I really lost it?

reddit karma as whuffie?

Thanks to some prompt emails from Jeremy and Tony (of RescueTime) alerting me to this ripe hunk of reddit-love, I effortlessly composed this entry. In the recent announcement of the Business of Software 2008 (it's September 3-4 in Boston).

Here's the best part of the lineup announcement:

Joel Spolsky, aka, "me," noted DJ, has over 600 karma points on the social news site "Reddit."

That's right, of all his accomplishments, Joel has decided to highlight his reddit karma score in his bio.

Frankly, I'd like to see this indicator beside the name of every panelist at these conferences. How do I make this happen?

While I figure this out, you'd better go register for BoS 08.


Oh, and you're going to StartupSchool @ Stanford this weekend, right? I just did some last-minute design work for them...

a chance to see the olympic torch, a right to protest it

I'm sorry I was out of town for this. Fortunately, the intrepid reddit Information Cowboy, Jeremy Edberg, was taking his normal commute into the office and reported on the commuter chaos.

Recently, there's been an undeniable shift in the perspective of these Olympic Games and of China. It's a bit curious considering nothing in the country has changed that dramatically, only the extent of global (or perhaps just American) awareness.

There's little talk of the air quality or modernizing facilities these days, just photos of bloodied monks and the reminder of how unfree a country China still is, despite the welcome embrace of free market wealth.

I'm still convinced we'll all be speaking in Mandarin one day (not just cursing, Firefly) -- let's just all do it in a world with civil liberties, mkay?

valleywag teaches me a new word and proclaims our friendship all in the same article

I know you're here for the new word, which is apotheosis.

ideal: model of excellence or perfection of a kind; one having no equal

As in, Facebook's "People You May Know" feature a geek apotheosis, the headline of a recent Owen Thomas piece. Even though Y Combinator's HackerNews is banning Valleywag, I've got no beef. And when they do stuff like this, making me feel like the prettiest belle at the ball, it's hard to dislike them.

Sure, I thought Facebook was a little off when it hinted I might be friends with Jimmy Wales, but the service is barely out of beta. Other suggestions, like Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, who I met casually once at a bar, is a perfectly suited addition to my list of Facebook "friends." Thus my faith in Mark Zuckerberg's ever-improving software remains unshaken.

There you go, proof that an open bar and Mark Sugarmountain can connect people like never before.

I happened to meet Jimmy Wales briefly at a party, too -- I even gave him a reddit pin, which he wore (note to scrappy startups: begging/blackmailing Internet celebrities into wearing your schwag is perfectly acceptable. In another century, they called it "gumption"). But facebook doesn't think we should be friends. Hmpf.

BTW, Owen, I just poked you.

techzulu interview: l.a. style, in a nightclub (or the cabin of a virgin america flight -- you decide)

Really bored and have 15 minutes to kill? Here's the other footage from the Community Next conference of a couple weeks ago. That's right, I was one of the last people to sit on a panel with Veronica Belmont of Mahalo Daily. She's now Veronica Belmont of Tekzilla. I knew we should have started a redditTV show...

My voice sounds funny and the lighting cuts out half-way into it, but the TechZulu guys are good people. They're proving once and for all that there are geeks in L.A. and they like startups just as much as those NoCal kids.

veronica belmont's cats hate reddit (or at least the alien, or bobbleheads?)

I was deeply saddened to hear this news, as we've got a strong LOLCats community on reddit. But I'm not going to use this entry to curry favor with the cat lobby. Instead of pandering, I'll issue this decree: Bring it on.

Veronica, I'd be happy to send you a new bobblehead. This one won't be stuffed with catnip.

digg punked me for trademark infringement

Back when that whole "Twitter" thing started taking off, I promptly registered the usernames "reddit" and "digg." Both accounts were idle for quite some time because I frankly didn't think Twitter was worth using (I still don't quite get it, despite all of Scoble's declarations to the contrary).

A couple weeks ago, I was directed to twitterfeed, a nifty site that seamlessly plugs an RSS feed into Twitter. So I did what any reasonable person who owned those 2 twitter accounts would do, I plugged the reddit rss feed into "reddit" and the digg rss feed into "digg."

Quite a few friends emailed me about why I, a co-founder of reddit, would do a such a thing. I didn't see the problem. If people want to use reddit, they will. If they want to use digg, they will. Google and Yahoo still co-exist.

So my digg Twitter account was happily twittering along until this morning. Here's the email I received:

Hi There,


We've received a note from Digg regarding your Twitter account. It has come to our attention that your Twitter account:


http://twitter.com/digg


is in violation of our Terms of Service, specifically article 6 of the General Conditions, which mentions trademark infringement:


6. We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.


To settle this issue we've changed the user name to "Digg_News" in the full name and user name fields in order to eliminate confusion. You can change your user name to something else if you'd like, but please honor the Terms of Service accordingly:


1. Visit Twitter.com/settings

2. Edit the Full Name and Username fields

3. Click "Save"


We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.


Thanks!

I guess this is the part of the blog where I'm supposed to rail against "the man," but I just don't care enough.

I'll just keep my decidedly-not-nefarious digg feed running on this new "digg_news" account and hope no one has a problem with me still using the digg logo.

it's about time. threat level earns a spot in the time top blogs index

The actual article isn't worth reading, let alone digging through all those pages to find, as they wasted the space to digress about Kevin Poulsen's hacker background.

So if all my trumpeting of Threat Level wasn't enough to convince you to add it to your RSS reader, maybe you'll take Time's word for it.

i always gnu graphjam was on to something once i saw it on reddit

Now you can find reddit on GraphJam. The indefatigable Cheez let me update his reddit button to better reflect the essence of reddit. A color-coordinated Microsoft Office logo just wouldn't cut it.

i can has... can has reddit

After working with "Cheez" to give the Internets a chance to propose and vote on questions for his upcoming ROFLCon interview, we noticed a nice change to I Can Has Cheezburger.

Take a look, not only is our button now on there, but it's also adorned with a hamster.

Cheez, you sir, are a great man.

alien bobblehead vs. mr. blonde video rockets to digg frontpage... really?

This was surprising. The digg community had no reservations digging the Reservoir Dogs ripoff to number one on the digg frontpage. The fervor continues in the comments:

Clearly this was a scientologist trying to ruin the reputation of Anonymous. (+30 diggs)

too bad i was not part of the action, let me know when the next hunt is so i can join you guys... (-7 diggs)

kind of overworked like a SNL skit. it goes on and on, you wait for it to get funny, then its done.

dugg down for 15 year old humor and lack of anything original. if you dugg this up, you are just exhibiting a conditioned response. you are a laugh track on a 'Dharma and Greg' episode. (+17 diggs)

Congrats on the submission, Burento...

submit and vote on questionable questions for questionable content

reposted from my official reddit blog entry:

You may remember last week's Q&A session with "Cheez" (not his real name) of I Can Has Cheezburger?. The result was a pretty diverse set of questions (it's not too late to vote & submit).

This week, we've got Jeph Jaques of the insanely popular webcomic, Questionable Content. Submit a question using the novel reddit "self" post and put the question in the title field. Jeph will be answering the best questions during ROFLCon this April in Cambridge, MA.

reddit gets a wsj journal shoutout, the triumph of a project that started as a gawker shirt slogan generator

Next week, the Dillard's Web site will start using technology from Reddit, a social news site acquired by Condé Nast in 2006.

The latest example involves Condé Nast, which designed a shopping and social-networking promotion for the retailer Dillard's. The promotion, to kick off next week, uses tools from news-aggregation site Reddit, which Condé Nast bought in 2006. It lets visitors to Dillard's Web site vote on merchandise that later will be featured in online ads.

-- from the WSJ

I remember when I first got pitched the idea of using a stripped down reddit to let Gawker readers submit and vote on t-shirt slogans. It wasn't a stretch for us technologically and I'd been able to work out a pretty good deal for the work. If you'd asked me then whether it had the potential to drive as much revenue as it does now, I probably have laughed and made a joke about dot-coms and "generating revenue."

But after working with our lovely partners at Gawker, we updated the product and built the tools to reduce our workload as much as possible. The end result got overhauled by Jeremy not long after he joined us at Condé Nast and the self-serve tool has been a hit ever since.

I spent a good chunk of my time in New York giving presentations on the tool and doing more general proselytizing reddit and explaining just what the hell we were doing there :)

The response was remarkably positive and I began handing out administrator accounts throughout the company with some lightweight documentation (Jeremy, a veteran of eBay/Paypal had baked most of it right into the app -- making both of our lives immeasurably easier). Next time, Jeremy, we'll make sure you get a quote and stipple portrait. You've earned it.

I'm quite pleased with all the creative projects teams around the company have built with our core software. Some of the designs have been quite innovative; it's a great example of just how little you know about your software until you let someone else create something with it. And best of all, it's been fairly seamless -- reddit polls get launched daily without much fuss and the pageviews roll in.

You can never assume you wholly know your own software -- you'll be surprised to find out what hidden products may lie within, just be flexible enough to try some out. You're a startup, after all, just buy an extra case of redbull and get it online.

footage of the captured reddit alien discovered

I'm speechless...

The only sensible recourse is to buy as many reddit alien bobbleheads as we can.

the alien is gone!

Anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of the alien should please contact me. I've caved and joined the Twitter ranks. I hear it's helpful for this sort of thing.

Consider this an online "Amber Alert." Thanks.

communitynext and l.a. show me a great time, open bar, and put me on a panel with some lovely people

There I was, flanked by Paul Cloutier of JPG Magazine (I finally got a subscription today) and Veronica Belmont of Mahalo Daily, who's as charming as she is talented, with the Big Brother-like face of Brian Sugar of Sugar, Inc. ominously projected on a giant screen behind us. Patricia Handschiegel moderated the panel entitled “Print: Are Newspapers Becoming Extinct?”

Fortunately, it wasn't just a short "Yes" answer from the 3.5 of us. (Skip ahead to video #4 below to view the panel discussion)

Stickam was broadcasting the entire event live (Justin.tv, where were you guys?) and grabbed me before I left for a quick interview (below) that was frankly one of the best I've ever done. For no other reason than the dude asking the questions was a hardcore redditor. We didn't have any Barbara Walters moments, but I think it turned out OK despite how guilty I was feeling about holding my friends up before dinner.

(Embedded player removed because it kept auto-starting and making people sad - here's the link)

It was a good trip out to LA, a city with an unsettling dependence on automobiles and tanning beds. The CommunityNext folks did a great job putting the event together, open bar and all. Only in LA would the conference itself take place in a night club. During the event, I even got to praise auctomatic and take a jab at Mike Arrington all in one breath. Bonus points!

There should be another (slightly more inebriated) interview with the folks at TechZulu going online once they get through their hangovers, no doubt...

chirag mehta: reddit alien for a day

One blogger called it a "bootleg face". One redditor even thought it was Steve Huffman. Understandably, quite a few redditors were curious about the sloppy photoshopping of someone's head on the reddit alien.

It's actually the head of super reddit fan, Chirag Mehta (half of the duo responsible for Sched.org and Chime.TV). I was at CommunityNext with some of our mutual friends and we decided to make his day and immortalize him in the logo for no good reason other than to make his day.

this was the most awkward photo we could find

It didn't scale down too well, as he didn't even recognize his own face until one of us told him. But he was fairly pleased once he understood.

I should also mention that he's going to be helping me with a neat side project and I needed to butter him up. Stay tuned, this is not the last you'll hear of Chirag -- although it's probably the last time you'll see his face on the logo.

the tsa takes itself very, very seriously

A very, very serious sign at BWI airport. I have a really funny joke to include here, but I don't want to risk being added to the No Fly List.

i can has reddit?

Why the angry BBQ? It appears to be the perfect foil to the happy chair from only days earlier. Both of these pictures came from a slice of Internet genius called I Can Has Cheezburger? (not a question, that's just the name of the site).

We're proud supporters of LOL-stuff (in fact, it's one of our UI translations) and we're happy to be partnering with ROFLCon to provide some interesting discussion for the upcoming interview with Cheez...

Excerpted from blog.reddit:

We're working with ROFLCon to produce the "Q" for a Q&A session with I Can Has Cheezburger? founder, "Cheez."

If you've been around since one of the early startup schools, you'll remember an interview with Caterina Fake of Flickr that featured all the top-scoring questions from an askCaterina reddit.

Well, we're doing it again with the founder of a meme that's been showing up a lot on reddit. If you enjoy a good LOL every now and then, you ought to submit a question (using "self" post) and vote on the rest. Even if you're not going to ROFLCon this April, the videos and transcripts will certainly be going online shortly thereafter.

We're aiming to do a new one of these every week, so keep an eye out for our next geek celeb ask.reddit -- Barbara Walters can't touch this.

happy spring, mom

It's a day late, but the first day of spring was March 20th.

just what do you think you're doing, sir clark?

The alien ponders the vast universe. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, probably best known for his work, 2001: A Space Odyssey, died on March 19th.

This news flooded the reddit new queue and generated quite a lot of discussion, including the suggestion for the above logo. He will certainly be missed.

He left a final message for planet Earth on YouTube that's worth a watch if you haven't already:

happy pi day

Alas, 3.14 has already come and gone. I hope you had a delicious apple pi day (cherry would also do).

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.

digg? i have no beef with digg

If Valleywag reports it, it must be true -- albeit blurry.

While getting a pre-flight, post-sxsw breakfast at the Austin airport with digg CEO Jay Adelson (no, we didn't spend the night together) I had no idea I was also chatting with a fellow rock band virtuoso.

Scoble and the gang should definitely take that act to the street. I think it'd do even better than the breadpig premier, which found its way to the digg front page today.

What's the only thing better than all the traffic from getting breadpig on the front page of a reddit competitor? Knowing it's lowering the intellectual rigor of their site by a notch or two :)

http://digg.com/xbox/Funny_Video_of_Guys_Playing_Rock_Band_on_the_Street

the alien never looked so good

This is the best photograph of a reddit shirt I've seen. Very professional stuff. I stumbled upon this flickr submission by sxld and couldn't help myself but blog about it. This was titled /psuedogeek, but I think this ought to have been /geek -- nothing psuedo about it.

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.

there's free beer in austin

Thanks for the free alcohol, Gawker!

As we prepare for our OpenFormat quasi-panel, I'm reminded of all the free alcohol from the night before.

The night went as expected (lots of free booze) and it ended with me sharing a queen bed with Chris -- also as expected.

I also had one of my ideas-of-the-month validated by Anthony of HypeMachine who uses stickers for business cards. The back (thicker than usual sticker paper) has all the important information and the front is an attractive sticker, because startups go through stickers like VCs go through souls.

just got to sxsw and i've already lost an hour of my life

Damn you, daylight savings! *shakes fist skyward*

I seem to remember the entire country of China doesn't have timezones at all. That's the way to live. One timezone, everywhere, no matter how wide your country is.

On an unrelated note, Guy Kawasaki was on my plane. No good story, though, it was just painfully clear that this particular SFO -> AUS flight was full of geeks.

Time to lose my SXSW-virginity!

the gawker empire is crumbling: I get two mentions in one day?

Woke up Friday morning to find an IM from an annoyed friend who found me in her daily news feed. You see, my friend Jenny 8 (the one who so graciously invited me to join her on the Colbert Report) had written an entry for the Huffington Post about how to "prepare for Colbert." (I just trademarked that rhyme, so don't even think about lifting it.)

In it, she cites an email exchange with an over-enthusiastic Colbert fan (me) suggesting some lines to use and hypothetical responses to expect:

After telling Colbert that Chinese food is more American than apple pie given how much we eat apple pie versus Chinese food...

Colbert : "I eat apple pie every morning - with a jack and coke - and a bald eagle egg omlette."

Jenny: Well, there are exceptions - and you are clearly an exceptional American - for most would say Chinese food.

Anyway, Gawker found this amusing, wrote a piece on it, and thus my name "Lee friend Alexis" polluted my pal's newsfeed.

And later in the day, Kotaku kindly plugged breadpig. Careful Denton, the readers of the vast Gawker empire are going to start revolting if you keep pushing such mediocre content...

Although, the quote of the day came in the comments section from a sage named fawrh:

the homeless guy = a good front man and a great insperation to us all...

the kids that made this video = should be sterilized...

On second thought, keep writing about breadpig, I hear there's a VH1 Behind the Music special on the way.

the breadpig soars, rocks

I started a company called Breadpig, Inc. last October to pursue some of my geeky design ambitions. I've been quite fortunate with the sale of reddit, so I'm not terribly interested personal gains from it; I'd rather donate the profits from the things I design. But I wanted to run breadpig like a business and create stuff that fellow geeks wanted to buy -- regardless of where the money was going.

My first project was aimed at the homogeneous greeting card industry. unHolidayCards raised quite a bit of money for Solving Kids' Cancer, a fantastic non-profit I've worked with in New York. The rest of the profits will fund breadpig prizes, the first of which will be announced March 14.

But the breadpig brand is a versatile one, so when I started a band last month with some childhood friends, there was no question as to what we'd name it. We've been practicing and jamming together for a long time now. Creating a band just seemed like the logical next step. Need proof? breadpigband.com

Here's a video from our first live show in D.C. last week:

A big thanks to the breadpig band for all the help in putting this together: Brian Femiano, Mike Scrivener, Adam Solomon, Jon Swyers, and Jacob Winthrop.

dreams do come true - i finally attend a taping of the colbert report

My friend Jenny 8 Lee was making the New York rounds this week promoting her new book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. I've had the pleasure of watching this book go from a proposal on her laptop, which I first read while in the middle of a Halloween party back in 05. I was sober enough to enjoy what I read and make a good impression -- we hit it off.

Along the way, I've gotten to read drafts of chapters and build her blog, along with a few other design tasks here and there. So I'm getting quite a bit of pleasure from watching all the success it's had so far.

And when Jenny told me she was going to appear on the Colbert Report, I immediately started drafting dialog and one-liners for her in an effort to solidify my chances of attending the show with her. It was absolutely worth it. Shaking Colbert's hand was akin to shaking the hands of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Hetfield all at once.

Colbert does a bit of Q&A before the show to humanize himself for the audience, revealing an man as affable as he is witty. The show went quite well -- even though he had to redo The Word segment -- and his interview with Jenny got quite a few laughs. And she even used one of my lines (comforting me with the knowledge that I nearly earned my attendance).

the great dungeon master didn't have a paladin/cleric nearby

I only played AD&D, but I still remember going over to my friend's house to play -- with his entire family. It was remarkable; he, his father, mother, brother, step-brother and his wife all played D&D.

Granted, a bad DM could make the experience a two hour affair that ended with cursing and spilled Mountain Dew -- the great ones created campaigns that could span over days, weeks, and even months.

I always played a Paladin, which I suspect a "defender of the light" like Stephen Colbert would have also chosen. I didn't get a chance to ask him during the pre-taping Q&A portion of last night's Colbert Report (more on that later), but as an avid D&D fan, he did express his dismay about the recent death of creator Gary Gygax.

The reddit community suggested a D&D-themed logo in his honor and I couldn't have agreed more. It's a game that I believe helped cultivate any storytelling prowess I have today. Pity that of all the legions of WoW fans, I'm sure few of them have ever even held a 20-sided die, let alone would play a pen & paper game.

Oh geez, now I sound like that old guy at the Wizards of the Coast store (since shut down)...

proof that latex is awesome

Didn't know you could draw the reddit alien in LaTeX? You're going to be a much more complete person once you see this.

I'm not quite ready to give up Illustrator, but this is still cool.

It even snagged over 180 points on reddit. Not too shabby, Filox.

Plus, here's a reddit logo for your trouble.