reddit

On Wednesday morning, I read about a new site called OurSignal, which mashes up the top headlines from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and HackerNews, promising to show a more diverse array of what the Web's recommending. Kind of like OriginalSignal for social news.

Unfortunately, when I loaded up OurSignal, staring me in the face was "Goatse In Spore," a reference to an extremely crude graphical Web meme (don't Google it, please). Not exactly the kind of top headline I was looking for.

The concept is kind of cool: "warm" colors mean a story is gaining … Read more

Reddit, the social news site that publishing giant Conde Nast acquired in 2006, has made a big announcement: The site's code, as of Wednesday, is open source. It's been released under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL).

"We'll leave it to the users and see what they come up with," co-founder Steve Huffman told CNET News.com in an interview when asked what the site expected would happen. But more than anything, he's hoping users will tweak some of what they want to see changed and add new features. Social news sites like Reddit … Read more

If you don't have content to populate your site, OneSpot has some for you. The Austin-based start-up joins a host of other companies in the business of delivering contextual links for publishers. OneSpot CEO Matt Cohen makes the claim that OneSpot "democratizes vertical or affinity publishing, helping anyone find, select, and deliver links to the best content on the Web."

OneSpot sifts through more than 200,000 RSS feeds to make content selections. Users provide the system with a set of sample sites, and OneSpot identifies related feeds, looking at link overlaps, Cohen told me. The selected … Read more

Social news site Digg has the beer-fueled Diggnation podcast, but its Conde Nast-owned rival Reddit is working on something more highbrow: a TV show on PBS.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced Wednesday on the company blog that the site will be powering the news behind YourWeek, a new show on affiliates of the public broadcasting network. In a more youth-focused spin than PBS' news is known for, the new show details the week's headlines as chosen by Reddit users. Reddit has set up a new section of the site for discussion.

"We're finishing taping on the pilot … Read more

Web news aggregator Naubo might be one of the unholiest unions I've ever seen. It could also be one of the best places for news junkies to get their fix. The service is an unabashed visual copycat of Google News, serving up the latest stories from around the Web. The difference is that it has a technology slant, covering news on big companies like Apple and Microsoft, along with gadgets, Linux, and hardware.

What makes Naubo interesting is that it uses this same spidering technology for blog chatter as it does for regular news, so like Techmeme you get … Read more

Social media has certainly come into its own over the last year. Whether you log more hours online than you do sleeping or are the type that only turns your computer on every couple of days — gasp — there is a good chance that you have some familiarity with social media, even if you didn't know that's what it was.

Maybe you get a chuckle every now and then from a video on YouTube, upload photos to Flickr for friends and family to see, ask and answer questions on Yahoo Answers, do a little networking and reconnecting with old … Read more

After telling you all that Digg was the best social destination of 2007, the column made it onto the front page of the site. And while some comments echoed my sentiment--namely, that other social sites are, well, crap--the vast majority of commenters found a number of faults in Digg.

Although the general opinion of Digg faithful can't be judged based on comments on one story, can it be said that there is a Digg revolt in the works that is led by a group of individuals who are fed up with Ron Paul stories, crazy videos, and a broken comment system?

If the comments on that story are to be believed, a revolt could happen.… Read more

Fawnt is a new font link directory that's got a variety of interesting and neat-looking fonts for your computer. I've been to a lot of sites like these in years past, and many are nauseatingly ugly and difficult to navigate. Fawnt, on the other hand, goes the slick and clean route, showing you a dozen fonts at a time in little white bubbles that can be navigated (12 at a time) with simple and large arrow buttons.

Clicking on any of the font links will take you to its site or origin, where you can go download and … Read more

FREE BEER!!!!

That was the rallying cry for the Reddit party in New York's East Village on Saturday night, the latest stop on the social news site's "Drankkit World Tour 2007"--an event series that has made it to San Francisco and Boston so far, with Toronto, Chicago, D.C., and a few others still to come. The Gotham installment took place in a woefully undersized Alphabet City dive called The Hanger Bar, and was not-so-woefully under-publicized. Reddit had reason to keep the rabble out.

That's because the beer was free all night long. Guess … Read more