Alexis Ohanian has a blog

10. Brooklyn, New York

Who says every New York startup has to work in Manhattan? According to BusinessInsider, Brooklyn ranks directly behind Manhattan as the borough with the most startup activity (including two from 2010′s 25 Hot New York Startups You Need To Watch list.) Recently, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced that he was moving to Brooklyn specifically to find and fund early stage startups in the area.

I think you'll agree, Jay-Z was on to something.

I love this. And I'm sharing it responsibly.

NYC Hackers Unite! Thanks to our pals at WeAreNYTech.com for the free advertising. They even kindly profiled me as the first NY Tech person of the new year.

And thanks as always to the fabulous Hadley Rouse for her impeccable artwork.

Big Brother has long been raised as a threat of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment (and cer­tainly the National Secu­rity Agency has done its fair share of snoop­ing). But in real­ity, it is the encroach­ment of Lit­tle Brother that aver­age Amer­i­cans are more likely to feel in our day-to-day lives — that peo­ple around us carry dig­i­tal devices that can be pulled out for photo or videos, or they can eas­ily copy dig­i­tal files (com­pared to the months of covert pho­to­copy­ing that Ells­berg did for 7,000 pages) that oth­ers would rather not have shared with the world.

One notable strength of raw mate­r­ial: it has a nat­ural viral lift for two rea­sons — audi­ence engage­ment, and the way legacy media jas oper­ated with regard to sourc­ing and competition.

Social media is a three-legged stool: cre­ate, con­sume, and share con­tent. Because orig­i­nal mate­r­ial often feels more like an orig­i­nal dis­cov­ery, it is more appeal­ing to share. Doc­u­ments, videos and pho­tos are there for any­one to exam­ine and expe­ri­ence first­hand. The audi­ence can inter­pret, debate, com­ment as they choose, and they feel greater free­dom to re-upload and remix that mate­r­ial, espe­cially video. The Neda video was recon­fig­ured numer­ous times, with var­i­ous sound­tracks, intro­duc­tions and spliced pho­tos. At a cer­tain point nearly all of the top 20 YouTube videos in the news and pol­i­tics cat­e­gory were dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Neda video. Many of these forms — par­tic­u­larly video and pho­tos — more eas­ily tran­scend inter­na­tional borders.

Fantastic article by my friend @jenny8lee on our post-Wikileaks world.

EyeforTravel's Ritesh Gupta interacted with Alexis Ohanian, Principal, Marketing at new flight search site Hipmunk to know more about the same.

Ohanian, who is scheduled to speak at the forthcoming Social Media Strategies for Travel USA 2011 conference, to be held in San Francisco next year (March 2-3, 2011), said, "We're just doing everything we can to create interesting content on our blog and keeping in touch with all of our users via the typical channels (twitter, facebook, and reddit). No matter what they're saying about us, we want to be part of the conversation."

Significantly, Ohanian believes it's harder for larger established brands to develop a true voice because they have to go through "so many layers of PR and whatnot".

"When you start from scratch and there's no filter, it's easier to build the confidence of your audience. Your users will accept that you're fallible as long as you treat them like adults," said Ohanian.

There's no big secret here, but the more people who understand the best way to do social media marketing is to actually genuinely participate in social media, the fewer charlatans offering "social media services" will stay in business.

I'm looking forward to speaking at the conference -- you can tell we learned a lot about trusting one's audience from starting reddit. I just hope to rekindle a little of that community magic with hipmunk.

...the more they stay the same. From reddit, of course.