Alexis Ohanian has a blog

Thanks for the love, Gadling! This should be a ton of fun; like Zach says:

Think Anthony Bourdain, but instead of a crotchety indifference to everything, we'll have a crotchety exuberance for everything with more fun, more wigs and more wheelchairs.

Here’s what we learned: Mr. Ohanian is, for lack of a better term, a complete cat lady. An earnest young woman had gotten him onto the subject of Karma (get it?), his beloved black cat. “She’s a diva,” he informed us, adding that “she’s waiting for me at home.” Whipping out his phone to show everyone a picture, he confessed she used to be the background, but “it got weird.”

Someone pulled him back to the topic of the IDL, which he explained simply as designed to deal with “anything that threatens to fuck up the Internet.” That’s a pretty broad mandate.

Yep. That's about right. Join IDL!

Now that's impressive. Wow. He first posted his video to /r/Music, then ended up doing an AMA on /r/IAmA.

DO IT NOW. And watch the video.

And vote over here.

If it is already a crowded space with entrenched players, consider focusing on a niche area initially, instead of going head to head with the existing leaders of the space. This is probably what you would have done if there were no search engines, and it’s often still the best approach. Find something that the entrenched players do not do well, and focus on that. Establish a reputation in that niche, become a leader in it, and then expand from there.

One great example of this is hipmunk.com for travel. They offer great visualizations of what your trip is going to be like. It’s a fantastic UI, and it’s attracting the attention of a lot of people.

I'm feeling the love, sir. Thanks!

While it was a great day for the company, Kayak definitely still has a lot to worry about. Personally, I like Kayak a lot and use it consistently. However, I’ve also started to use Hipmunk to complement Kayak, and if I could get Hipmunk to change a few things, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to see myself switching over full-time. I’m sure some other readers may be in a similar boat.

More work to be done! We'll do our best, Rip.