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...

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:

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