instant quaker reddit

zachalexander just created a quaker reddit for the online Quaker community. He blogged about it on his LiveJournal and thus I couldn't help but give him a shout-out here.

Best of luck growing your new reddit. Hopefully it develops as quickly as some of that instant oatmeal. I have a feeling there won't be many flamewars or trolls on a Quaker reddit.

Remember, zachalexander, you can customize the look of your reddit with a little CSS, or simply change the logo. Not that I have any suggestions...

an extra serving of holiday mirth

FeedANeed is kicking ass and taking names -- literally (well, only the second part, that's how we sign up all our volunteers and non-profits). Erik is doing some great work, but that would obviously be moot if it weren't for our community, which has responded so enthusiastically.

And I can't say enough about the job a bunch of Canadian geeks did with HoHoTO. In fact, I thought I'd said everything here on the breadpig blog. But here it is again, just because I'm so impressed by how a disparate group of people can mobilize and do some good so quickly and efficiently.

I'm actually feeling good about 09.

JoelOnSoftware gets a neat redesign - with a few blurry aliens

Joel got a redesign. It's pretty hip. It features a header with a huge picture of the FogCreek offices. And if you look closely in the upper-left corner...

I'm waiting to get some conclusive numbers back, but I'm almost certain those bobbleheads have increased FogCreek productivity significantly. Thanks for not cropping them out, Joel.

And a thanks to Mike, an avid Spolsky reader, for first pointing this out.

reddit is trying to make the world suck a little less again this december

One year ago it was the reddit-xkcd fundraiser for the EFF (as chosen by the greater reddit community). This year, it's Feed A Need.

The economy sucks and we know that. More to the point, Erik realized that, so when he joined reddit, he came armed with a radical new idea for this year's fundraiser.

It wouldn't even be a fundraiser. It would be a skill-raiser.

To quote blog.reddit:

This holiday season, reddit.com is launching its first Feed A Need project. Instead of asking for monetary donations, we're asking people to donate a few hours of their skills & energy. So if you are a programmer, designer, artist, lawyer, geology professor, bacon cooker, or anyone else with a few hours to spend for a good cause please consider participating in this year's Feed a Need charity drive.

And from these volunteers, a chunk will be randomly selected to win a range of prizes - including an XBOX 360 (with games) from Destructoid and autographed XKCD goodies. Of course, none of these great prizes will compare to that feeling you get from volunteering some of your time and skills. But they are nice.

deadspin gets a redesign, blames reddit

How touching. Deadspin got a very reddit-esque redesign

Yeah, yeah. I know. You're looking at this page and thinking 'when the hell did Deadspin turn into Reddit?'

But relax. What you're seeing right now is the "condensed" version of the front page. This whole thing is done to make the Deadspin reading experience more enjoyable, especially for people who just like to skim headlines and pretty photos of Steve Young getting bopped in the face with a plastic cup.

Aww, shucks. Thanks for the shout-out, DAULERIO.

I think it'd be worth asking Nick why you don't have reddit buttons yet...

We've got an up and coming sports.reddit, you know. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell it -- it's sensitive.

bostonist is reading reddit (appropriate, given we're a boston - er, somerville - founded company)

Yes, we were happy to read that students in Massachusetts are defying the overall American trend of math and science failure.

Bostonist nailed it in this recent entry, Mass Kids Smarter than Scottish Schoolchildren, Slightly Dumber than Singaporeans:

Unfortunately, the US as a whole still lags behind at 539, which could mean that while we won the race to the Moon, even Latvia could beat us to Mars. Here's hoping that with a sitting president in office who values math (read: won't insist on manipulating data to suit his needs) and science (read: doesn't believe that humans and dinosaurs shared caves back in the old days) these scores will improve. Until then, Reddit readers may continue to vote this story up as proof that the liberals of Massachusetts are, in fact, smarter than the rest of the country.

Sure, redditors were no doubt upvoting this with gusto, but despite the misleading reddit headline, this has little to do with ideology (left or right) and more to do with a heightened focus on math and science education.

That, and I bet all of those kids who skewed up the average are hardcore redditors...

the secret is out

I take it as a compliment that people still get surprised we're not just "some dudes in their basement." A redditor named oddasudda just realized we'd been acquired.

We've tried to maintain the feel of a small site and Condé Nast has gone out of their way to not intervene with how we operate reddit. As a result, the site has continued to grow and we continue to have disappointed redditors learn we've got health insurance and work in an office.

And we've even open sourced!

In fact, we're still learning about our own users, who volunteered to share a bit about themselves on this ask.reddit: Who Are You?

a good week for cute on thecutelist

We've been busy naming dogs and a cat on reddit's TheCuteList, but this is our second reddit dog (Bacon was our first). Andrewinmelbourne spotted this dapper canine and submitted it yesterday.

Granted, redditors like mdedm were conflicted:

+1 for Reddit logo. -1 for putting a shirt on a dog.

But that's why you can vote up, down, and not at all. Don't worry, reddit dog, I voted you up.

going to be in new york on january 24th? you should be

Mark your calendar for the first ROFLThing of 2009: January 24th, 2009. New York will never be the same.

Not only will it be as epic an event as the first ever ROFLCon of last April, it's also going to be hosted by me. I'm still trying to decide on a costume, but I have a feeling this is an event you wont want to miss.

It's the same ROFLtastic team who brought you all those other flavors of ROFL, only this one is going to be in the New York city, which means LOLcats doing lines off strippers and TronGuy brawling with Naked Cowboy (TronGuy wins, easily).

They generously announced it on the ROFLBlog, but you should probably see my moderation of the LOLcats panel that sealed the deal.

And then watch this clip from the original ROFLCon in Cambridge:

biggest reddit alien ever

I need to share this. A redditor called AlLnAtuRalX made a huge frigging alien.

He shared it in this comment thread two months ago, yet somehow I only found it this week.

A huge Reddit alien (55 inches x 42.5 inches) on my wall above where I sleep... I am welcoming our new overlords.

Took me an hour to make, but it was worth it.

And we're even treated to an update:

it's still proudly taking up that whole wall... You can see it from outside my house and at night it kind of glows... Makes for a nice eerie, Reddit-y feeling as I near my house :D.

I can only hope that one day everyone gets a "nice, eerie, reddit-y feeling" when they approach their house...

sarah palin invades reddit? i think this was photoshopped

Whoa, ProbablySucks.com must really like Mrs. Palin. Will the LOL-Palin catch on?

half-life redux is 1 minute and 54 seconds of awesome

Now this is impressive.

this is not what i would call 'over-selling'

Chris wins the day with this picture of our favorite sandwich board on the way to our favorite Chinese restaurant in SF.

Also, it's not blurry at all -- get your eyes checked.

it's like twitter is mocking me

I'd just twittered about how my Blackberry Pearl survived a 15 story free fall (sent via txt from said phone). And when I logged on, this "Is your phone okay?" message greeted me.

Real comforting, guys. It turns out I'd shut off my ability to send/receive txts thanks to a fail-ful phone conversation with AT&T to enable tethering.

But even that couldn't dampen my glee when the maintenance worker retrieved my phone from the bowels of the elevator shaft. Yes, I managed to drop it through the crack between the elevator and the hallway. Look at it sometime, you'd never think someone could do that, but this is a skill that comes only with much practice (10,000 hours, Malcolm!).

Oh, and I'm a shareholder in Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry) but don't consider this an attempt to single-handedly resurrect the company's stock -- I'm saving that magic (and my last sacrificial goat) for Yahoo!.

andrew sullivan cheers "the power of the reddit generation"

We had a nice mention in this FastCompany article by Chris Dannen: People-Powered Internet Grows Up

Reddit is a user-generated clearinghouse for "what's new online." Like its rival, Digg.com, the site presents visitors with a numbered list of linked headlines that they can either vote up or down, depending on their taste; anyone can submit headlines, but no one is paid.

"There's a core group of Reddit users that are submitting and editing," says Alexis Ohanian, Reddit's 25-year-old co-founder. "But [at] some point we're going to hit the ceiling of nerds on the Internet who want to share cool, geeky stories. It's depressing, but we know that we will." So to keep the 3-year-old site growing at a brisk pace, the Reddit team--which says it receives about 4.3 million unique hits per month--recently announced a new function on the site that will allow users to create Reddits for their own online communities.

And Andrew Sullivan added some 'Cool Whip to the pumpkin pie' (Thanksgiving's answer to the 'icing on the cake' cliche) with a brief entry, The Human Algorithm:

Chris Dannen sees the power of the Reddit generation.

The power of the reddit generation.  I like the sound of that. Chris and Andrew, I hope you each got an extra slice of pie.

Wish you all had a great Thanksgiving -- no shortage of things to be thankful for here.

reddit will help you lose your virginity and make your goat famous -- not simultaneously (the la times said so)

Somehow I missed this post on reddit, but Mark Milian of the LA Times technology blog didn't:

Thanks to some attention from Reddit, the social news website, Help a Virgin has seen a major surge in Web traffic. The site has been up since at least the summer (the last time it was updated was July), but after it hit Reddit's front page on Sunday, the traffic counter has more than doubled -- to 80,000 and rising. At this rate, his scheme won't succeed (he wouldn't even get half the target number) so he'll definitely need some additional attention. (He didn't respond to my e-mail requests for an interview, but, then again, I'm not a woman.)

In other news, reddit will also help make your goat photos famous:

A photo of mountain goats scaling a cliff, featured on Roger Eickholt's Flickr page, was all the rage on Monday. It was plastered on social media sites and around the blogosphere, driving more than 200,000 people to view it. [...]

When Eickholt analyzed Flickr's link referral page to make sense of his newfound prominence, Reddit.com topped the list. What is Reddit, you ask? "This website talks about current events and stuff like that, I guess," said Eickholt. "I have no idea. I've never really been to those websites before."

Reddit, like all social media websites, is serendipitous. Few know what type of photograph, video or news bit is going to explode, and what's going to fizzle. And often times, content creators aren't the ones who submit their own links -- they don't discover that their photos had struck gold until later. "It just seems so random," Eickholt said. "You never know what's going to take off like that."

Welcome to reddit, Roger.

co2stats up for a crunchie

It's almost time for some frivolous Web 2.0 awards -- must be the Crunchies!

I purposefully haven't written about my investments before, but VentureBeat spilled the beans a little while back. One startup I've invested in is CO2Stats.

They've developed a way to analyze a site's total power consumption and automagically purchase carbon credits to offset it. The duo behind it is a force to be reckoned with and their business model is straightforward. Being profitable definitely helped, too.

While I don't believe carbon offset credits are the total solution for combating climate change, they're an effective step in the right direction.

I naturally felt compelled to vote for them. And some part of me feels it's my duty to include that link in a blog entry. That, and work on a mascot for their green search engine: GreenSeng.

the internet shows its support for crowbars and gordon freeman

Our crowbar announcement went over well on reddit, fark, and Destructoid. But that was to be expected -- these communities understand the importance of having this crowbar at CERN and in the hands of Dr. Freeman.

But this important event didn't go unnoticed elsewhere:

• Kotaku: Large Hadron Collider Guys Get Theatrical With Half-Life Street Theatre
• Gizmodo: CERN's 'Gordon Freeman' Employee Receives Crowbar, Starts Murdering
• ShackNews: CERN's Freeman Picks Up Crowbar from Gamers, Begins Saving the World
• 1Up: 'Real Gordon Freeman' Saves CERN from Headcrab Invasion
• The Escapist: Meet The Real Gordon Freeman, Ready For Action
  

gordon freeman gets his crowbar, the internet responds gleefully

Not surprisingly, the dramatic conclusion of gaming.reddit's crowbar intiative did well on reddit and fark. If you haven't seen them yet, the photos and video are pretty spectacular.

We couldn't have done it without AlpineKat, the physcist also responsible for such Internet greatness as The Large Hadron rap.

We've gotten some nifty remixes from redditors (below are two of them) and our friends at Destructoid are soliciting photoshop and YTMND awesomeness from their own community. And to top it all off, Fark gives it their blessing -- after all, they provided the invaluable Half-life strategy guide, so Gordon would know exactly what to do when it all goes down.

shopped (or is it?) by TheNoxx

shopped (with gusto) by iamah

we care about frog literacy

Blast from the past: Aaron emailed a surprising shoutout (albeit unintentional) from a book on lit crit.

A friend tells me that in the book An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle), there appears a joke along the lines of:

Q: What does a frog say when you give him a book?
A: reddit, reddit, reddit, reddit, ...

Deep down, I'm imagining Nicholas Royle is a hardcore redditor.