Monday, August 31, 2009

Teaser: reddit's Ron Paul Interview Video Coming Soon!

Erik (hueypriest) and Jeremy (jedberg) made it back from Clute, TX with a few good stories. Despite some time constraints, all the top 10 reddit questions you voted up were asked. We're getting the video together now, but thought we'd tease you with this photo of Dr. Paul's office.

Monday, August 24, 2009

reddit's Fantastic Voyage - reddit ambassadors Ahoy!

In the spirit of Lewis & Clark, Bilbo Baggins, and Ham the Astro Chimp, two redditors are set to embark on a great journey. redditors Draynen and 77or88 will be taking a month long jet-setting adventure across the United States dreamed, funded, organized, toasted, and FOR the vicarious enjoyment of redditors. This whole project started when hiS_oWn saw Jet Blue's announcement of a "All You Can Jet" tickets and planted the seed of reddit funding one of it's own to "To travel around and do stuff for us, like courier packages, or do requests for us as compensation?" Fast forward 72 hours, and not one but two unemployed redditors had tickets and a growing slate of missions.

As hiS_oWn said in the recap post, "Before I begin I just want to say how crazy it is to have brainstormed an idea, raised [over]$1600 in cash, screened countless candidates, got a travel plan, tickets, etc. all in less than 3 days." The two travelers will kick off their journey on September 8th in San Francisco, with a stop at reddit HQ. From there the duo will travel across this great land visiting redditors in a manic blaze of missions, bacon, and happy chemtrails.

Just to be absolutely clear, and to make sure credit is given where it is due, this expedition was funded entirely by the generous and private donations of individual redditors, as well as corporate donations by sponsors Foodproof and Associated Content. It was made possible by the impressive organizing skillz of Saydrah, hiS_oWn, and all of the other redditors who participated. reddit's "official" position on this is obviously "Awesome!", but we are merely eager (and slightly jealous) spectators.

It's not too late to get involved. Here are a few ways to take part in the adventure:
You can also read quotes from interviews with all the principles in this feature article by redditor mikeymell.

As 77or88 sums up, "To be honest, it feels very strange to have a group of 500 people (and growing) working to plan out how I am going to have the best month ever. Really, the surreality of it all just makes it that much cooler. This whole thing is insane and amazing, and I hope that I get to meet and thank as many of you weirdos as possible in the coming month!"

If you didn't realize it yet, you "weirdos" are amazing.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Got something great you want to promote in front of reddit, but don't have a great big budget? Let's talk

You know that NARWHAL Commission we started? Well, one of the first things they wanted to see was more ads from within the reddit community. Advertising by redditors, for redditors.

Let's do this. Message me with your email address and how much you've got in your budget and we'll find an advertisement that's right for you.

Monday, August 17, 2009

TruBlood is even tastier than the real thing - starring in our Halloween party

Thanks to our friends at a the Omni Consumer Products Corporation, team reddit got an early taste of the new Tru Blood beverage folks have been talking about. This drink could single-handedly redeem the damage done to vampire culture by Twilight.

And we're proud to announce that Tru Blood will be featured beverage (preferably with vodka) at our Halloween party here in San Francisco. More details are to come, but if you're planning on spending the best holiday of the year in the Bay Area, make a note in your social calendar for the reddit Halloween party.

If you missed drankkit, here's your chance for redemption.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Thanks to you, reddit, a Berkeley grad student will graduate - see his work

Back in April, we asked for your help with a survey to benefit a Berkeley student, Srikanth Narayan, working on a graduate thesis about large-scale online discussions. Being familiar with such things on reddit, he came to the community for some help.

Well, his work is done. And it's even got sexy visualizations. Take a gander!

Srikanth is very interested in hearing what you all think, so let him know.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Still using Firefox without Socialite? You deserve better (you deserve Socialite)

Wish you could take reddit functionality along everywhere you went? While our up/down arrow stickers are still in production, there's already a digital - free! - way to have the alien along for a ride in your Firefox.

We've relaunched the Socialite page here on reddit with a new twist. We jazzed up the design a bit, but also added a bacon-colored button that we understand chromakode - the redditor who built this Firefox addon - is rather pleased with.

It's a way for you, if you've enjoyed your Socialite experience, to donate some cash to show him you appreciate his work (it's like a digital dap). Naturally, you can still download (or continue to use) the application for free, but this has been a request we've heard around the community.

We looked at the AppStore model Apple has developed with notable success. As a developer for Apple, you receive 70% of each sale. That wasn't good enough for us, so 75% of your payment is going right to chromakode.

The remaining 25% goes right to keeping reddit's servers running. In the interest of full disclosure, there's also a small portion of that going toward our office bacon & coffee fund. This keeps our humans running.

After benefiting from open-source for years, we open-sourced reddit in June 2008. Since then, we've enjoyed a number of benefits, not limited to security improvments, nifty spinoffs, and holiday cards from Richard Stallman.

If you're a developer with a great idea and would like to one day see your own reddit.com/awesomeappname -- dig into code.reddit.com and let us know when you've got something full of win.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

reddit + TED Interview Sir Ken Robinson

Submit and vote on questions here.

Our relationship with TED started not long after their famous talks began appearing on our front page; the talks were so well liked that we made them a featured channel on reddit.TV. And one of their most viewed talks was delivered by Sir Ken Robinson, whom reddit has the privilege of interviewing with our friends at TED.

Sir Ken is a creativity expert. He challenges the way we're educating our children, and champions a radical rethinking of our school systems to better cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. His latest book, The Element, looks at how we find our creative passion.

If you haven't seen his brilliant, funny talk yet, see below. If you're ready to submit and vote on the best questions for Sir Ken, click here; our partners at TED will ask him the top 10 questions as of Monday evening, 7pm Eastern.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Better know a reddit logo (AKA, the Colbert Bump)

You may have heard that Stephen Colbert gave reddit a shoutout last week during his segment introducing Movits! (who rock, btw) a Swedish swing-hip-hop-jazz band he discovered on our site.

Needless to say (and as I'm sure my neighbors can attest) we got a little excited. And yes, though it wasn't a direct Colbert Bump - more of a Colbert Nudge - we did see a nice little spike the following day. Movits! is no doubt feeling Äppelknyckarjazz-tastic after the exposure; we'll be running some complimentary ads on reddit for their new album because they rock (röck?) so much.


The day after Colbert


Even hugging you, they're still the #1 threat to America


Luckily, Stephen Jr. saved the day


If this were Mortal Kombat, Colbert would have just scored a fatality (or maybe animality?)

Here's the video, for your viewing pleasure:
The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Movits!
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTasers
 
http://www.redditblog.com/2009_08_01_archive.html
www.redditblog.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-49
101588
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:IRVUQEYO67WX5Z7A5ZPJ2TINEPYP6FNR
<urn:uuid:32202976-cf59-40dd-9b19-1f580bf8c29e>
2014-11-28T10:51:36Z
64.233.171.121
sha1:NZH7LZF3VW3XKURTUEHAPCLKOHZOW65O
<urn:uuid:d3bc8231-cba0-4782-abf2-875720a82a0b>
http://www.redditblog.com/2009_08_01_archive.html
length
response
<urn:uuid:ff8f3997-1a45-48b6-84e2-dbb1a90f0ec0>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-235-23-156.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-49
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for November 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf