Alexis Ohanian has a blog

The infamous Pepsi PDF could have just been a marketing ruse, but it was nonetheless leaked on reddit and we found our alien as the source for a number of mainstream media outlets.

It made headlines in the Telegraph and MediaBistro. And given all the smiley-face-to-Pepsi-logo juxtaposition, combined with all the advertising jargon, it's easy to see why this would get people talking/laughing.

I'd always dreamed of the day we'd be in the New York Post... I CAN'T HIDE HOW MUCH I LOVE THOSE ALL CAPS HEADLINES.

It's called ROFLDNA and it's the result of the last ROFLThing event in New York. Ask for just some opening remarks and you'll get me cheek-swabbing all your Internet celebrities.

In said opening remarks, I had designated the New York Stem Cell Foundation as the recipient of the auction proceeds, but something happened between then and now. Namely, Science Commons appeared on the front page of reddit and I had a few beers with their VP of Science. A few drinks can go a long way.

We've also formed some great plans for reddit to partner with them in the coming months. The community responded so well to the idea that we couldn't help but form this allegiance.

Not bad for the first workday since Apple approved it (on Valentine's Day). I take my metaphorical hat off to the 280North team, who did all the work to bring iReddit to life. Early reviews have been overwhelmingly positive and they've already got a revision in the Apple approval process to fix a few nagging bugs.

Of course, it didn't hurt that the sponsored link on reddit got so many upvotes it was even voted onto the front page. Guess folks really did want us to release an official iPhone app...

This made me laugh. I think I may have found a use for twitter after all.

Julia has declared a fondness for geeks in the past, but she's currently excited about the new reddit iPhone app (iReddit) -- or at least the commercial.

And reddit was there to celebrate it. See today's logo if you need any more convincing...
Now I'm off to a Darwin-themed pub crawl -- this is going to be more fun than carrying around dead finches on the HMS Beagle.

Part of the extended Wired family, Cult of Mac is joining in on some apple.reddit desktop sharing.

A desktop can really say a lot about a person. I hope mine isn't the only one with a reddit alien on the dock (go Adium, go!).

In a pre-emptive strike, the street artist Shepard Fairey filed a lawsuit on Monday against The Associated Press, asking a federal judge to declare that he is protected from copyright infringement claims in his use of a news photograph as the basis for a now ubiquitous campaign poster image of President Obama.

The suit was filed in federal court in Manhattan after The Associated Press said it had determined that it owned the image, which Mr. Fairey used for posters and stickers distributed grass-roots style last year during the election campaign.

I know the A.P. is looking for some innovative business models, but this is a joke.

Shepard, I've got your back.

Who's going to be next to sue for this inspiring artwork?

Do I understand how this works? Not really, but it makes a ton of reddit aliens. An infinite army of them, in fact...

N'Gai Croal, who so graciously took some great photos of the breadpig band during our SpikeTV shoot, recently interviewed me for a piece, All the President's Tweets, about how Obama ought to bring technology to the White House.

If there is a chance to really change WhiteHouse.gov, elder statesman Jeff Jarvis and I daydreamed about how technology could help the Obama administration better work for us, since we are after all, its boss.

[...] it's a sentiment echoed even more concretely by Ohanian. "Lots of data comes out of government; we don't all want to have to slog through it, but computers can," he says. "So if they can make that data available in accessible formats—data that belongs to us as taxpaying citizens—that could be great." He cites "Web 2.0 mashups," like Google Maps with housing values or crime statistics overlaid on them, as an example of the kinds of creative ways that government-assembled data could be reused if provided in XML (extensible markup language) formats, which define the content of a document separately from its formatting precisely so that it can be repurposed in other applications.

And if anyone from the White House is reading this, that means no more PDFs, whose contents aren't easily searched or extracted for further use. Says Ohanian: "PDFs are the bane of my existence—they aren't much more of a favor than having a printed document."

Fortunately, every indication we've gotten from the Obama team since they went online for his campaign is that they're absolutely capable and willing to get this kind of technological change done. The task they're facing, and all the obstacles in their way, are largely the result of legacy. It's a shame it has to be backwards-compatible. It's a pity we didn't have all this technology (or some incredible foresight) when the British burnt down the White House, as we could have rebuilt it with this kind of transparency in mind.

The kind that present technology facilitates with ease.

As for Ohanian, what he hopes to see after a four- or eight-year Obama presidency is for Whitehouse.gov to become a useful tool. "I've never had a reason to go to Whitehouse.gov before. So if it becomes a usable tool for citizens, that will be an accomplishment, because it means that the tech has been put to good use." That's a lot to place on a single URL. Let's hope that Obama & Co. are up to the task.

It's true, the closest I'd ever gotten to WhiteHouse.gov was when I'd trick friends into visiting WhiteHouse.com (formerly a NSFW site). I look forward to the day when the .gov is a regular destination.