The Social

After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That's the company's latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday.

"Today is the day Reddit fully becomes a platform for building link sharing sites," a post on the company blog explained. Technically, developers could already do this. But now the site is making it easier for them to do so, and letting them customize the design of the voting system to fit their own sites; more importantly, they can import them off the Reddit domain.

Reddit Bacon.

The site's humor-inclined team referred to the site update as "somewhere between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and when six hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium and (eventually) life as we know it." More likely, it'll make the news-voting system proliferate on sites that wouldn't otherwise have it; Reddit's team brought up the example of an entire Reddit voting system devoted to people who love bacon, for example.

Though Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division in 2006, is much smaller than rival Digg and the fast-growing Yahoo Buzz, this could make some waves. Plenty of sites have tried to build third-party social news systems in-house, and Reddit's open-source alternative could make it easier to integrate this sort of thing.

Plus, the company is hosting a contest to see who can create the best "custom Reddit" from scratch (i.e., fewer than 250 subscribers) in a month. The winner gets a MacBook Air laptop, a $1,500 Apple gift card, and a bucketload of free Reddit gear. Go, bacon guys, go!

The top headlines at a given time on Wednesday morning at OurSignal. Yeah, a bit short on relevant news.

(Credit: OurSignal)

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 momentum, and "cool" colors mean it's fading. Bigger boxes mean more votes on a story across the Web. And it refreshes every 15 minutes, which isn't that impressive in the real-time culture of Summize, but is still quick enough to provide a fresh take on the news.

That's the problem: news. Social-news sites, for better or for worse, have become known for being places to find the most popular Top 10 lists and funny videos in addition to the news, and OurSignal is no exception. So if you're looking to find the goofiest Digg and Reddit headlines in one place, this is a nice resource; but if you're actually looking for the news, you might be out of luck. Putting a handful of social-news sites together unfortunately doesn't do much to help the content.

I'll stick to Google News for now, thanks.

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).

The Reddit alien mascot. 'You can play with me now!'

"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 and Digg are often home to extremely opinionated communities, and by making its code open-source, Reddit will be able to let those users work on the site themselves to an extent rather than repeatedly petitioning for changes.

"It was kind of an easy decision for us," Huffman explained. "One of our driving goals is to stay as open and transparent as possible and give our users an alternative to mainstream media...this is just the next logical step toward that goal of opening up the actual system." He added that he was surprised that Conde Nast was so quick to approve Reddit's proposal to go open-source.

Reddit now counts 4.5 million unique visitors monthly, significantly smaller than rivals Digg and Yahoo Buzz. But the site has grown 1,000 percent since the acquisition by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division, Huffman said. And its open-source move is something that none of its competitors is doing, he emphasized.

Growth of news aggregation start-ups, however, could take a hit when the frenzy over the 2008 U.S. election is over. "I'm not too worried about it," Huffman said. "I think traffic will definitely change a little. We've seen that in smaller scales already. We saw when the Ron Paul movement kind of came and went...when Ron Paul kind of cooled down, a lot of those users left but the traffic stayed up."

Reddit has a history of openness, too. Last year, to celebrate its acquisition, the company toured around the country giving away free beer.

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 this weekend and I can confirm that the Reddit alien (the site's mascot) will be getting on-camera time," Ohanian said to readers. The site is celebrating its new show's user-generated spirit by throwing a contest for users to remix its theme song--"I suspect it won't be long before we get a Rickroll remix," he added.

Right now, there's no formal debut date as the show is not completely greenlit. The show's pilot will be broadcast online only, hitting the Web on June 6, and YourWeek will ideally launch on PBS stations in the fall.

Meanwhile, Reddit, which trails Digg in traffic and faces new competition from Yahoo Buzz, still has nothing against beer.

(Credit: Reddit)

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 that's what happens when Conde Nast snatches you up.

CrackBerrys, clockwise from left: Charles Forman, Anthony Volodkin, Scott Kidder

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)

There were no costumes involved, unlike the Boston Reddit party on Halloween, Most of the people in the crowd were avid Reddit members who'd put their usernames on their name tags; they seemed to be a quirky and sociable bunch, and a few people remarked that they'd be interested in seeing what the demographic differences would be if a similar party were thrown by Reddit rival Digg. (Who knows?) Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were actively talking to their guests and keeping the scene at the bar under control (Ohanian wanted to give the bartenders a hand, but the establishment's rules banned him from getting behind the tap).

Also spotted: Alley social fixtures Nate Westheimer of BricaBox and Michael Galpert of Worth1000 were making the rounds--it's tough to show up at a New York tech event and not run into either or both of those guys. Gawker Media's Scott Kidder was also there, attempting to dissuage rumors that his employer's "Guide to Conquering All Media" had been .

Iminlikewithyou.com founder Charles Forman was making quite the social splash, wearing a name tag that said "Mark Zuckerberg" and passing out obscenely large business cards that got everybody's attention. Some interesting developments for his aesthetically impressive social networking experiment, like games and some taggable videos, are on the way.

When asked "How's business?" Forman replied, "What business?" with a laugh. If only the rest of New York could be so laid back.

A couple of local music start-up execs were in the house too, with social radio site Jango and music blog hub The Hype Machine representing. Hype Machine co-founder Anthony Volodkin was getting some light-hearted jabs for the sociological disconnect between his trademark shoulder-length hippie hair and the slick BlackBerry he kept checking for new messages. Someone told Volodkin that he should make an appareance in one of those BlackBerry ad campaigns that attempts to deconstruct the brand's uber-corporate image. You heard it here first.

The hot trend in New York's digital scene: operating a Tumblr blog. The homegrown start-up, fresh off a relaunch and new venture cash, is the latest cool way to waste time and share too much information with your friends.

The Reddit party might've seemed like a small dotcom event, but there were a few reminders of Reddit's parent company--namely, a handful of "Nasties" in the crowd. Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital (the Conde Nast division that owns Reddit), was around, as was Ted Nadeau, general manager of CondeNet, the media conglomerate's Internet division. There were also two Portfolio.com bloggers bantering about, like, the economy, or disgraced Wall Street honchos, or something like that. (Dude! It's a dotcom party! You're supposed to talk about nerdier things!)

I wasn't the only press in the house. Valleywag's local "Alleywag," Nicholas Carlson, was carrying around an imposing SLR camera and attempting to capture any potentially scandalous moments--of which there weren't many, except when a drunken brawl reportedly almost materialized outside the bar, but nobody's really sure whether that was directly related to the Reddit event anyway. We were sad that nobody from the Silicon Alley Insider was around, because then we'd have a three-way race to see who could get a quality blog recap up first.

Vimeo founder (and Tumblr investor) Jakob Lodwick and videoblogging Star magazine editor-at-large Julia Allison are indeed dating again, for the record. Lodwick reported that Vimeo's foray into high-definition Web video has been going extremely well, and that the Connected Ventures brand is considering a white-label initiative so that businesses as well as lip-dubbing hipsters could take advantage of the video-sharing technology. We also talked about 20th-century Russian literature. Don't ask.

Speaking of novelty business cards, Julia Allison's take the cake: pink, with "Julia" in a handwriting-style font on one side and the URL of her personal Web site on the other. You know, I've been thinking. That really ought to be my new goal in life: get my name recognition so high that I can carry around bright red business cards that say "Caroline" in a Roy Lichtenstein-worthy comic book font, and have everybody know exactly who I am.

Then I'll know I've made it in the big city.