reddit

StumbleUpon adds more partner sites

StumbleUpon, an online discovery site that competes with Digg, Mixx, and Reddit, said Tuesday it has expanded its partner program to include Funny Or Die, Atom, Scientific American, and 5min.com.

StumbleUpon launched its partner program this fall with HowStuffWorks, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The Huffington Post. According to StumbleUpon, its partner program tools help sites' users find articles, photos, and videos indexed by StumbleUpon without heading to StumbleUpon's site, downloading its toolbar, or registering for an account.

StumbleUpon said its feature offer more exposure for its partner sites' best content and, in turn, increase the appeal of … Read more

Reddit goes 'Independent,' says more deals to come

Social news site Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division two years ago, has announced the start of a new strategy to distribute its technology around the Web. It's partnered with the U.K.'s Independent newspaper to install Reddit technology on its Web site and encourage readers to vote up and down on the news.

While a prominent button for the Independent's internal voting system will appear on each of the publication's online news stories (these will show up in a few weeks), it will also accept links submitted from around the … Read more

Reddit now lets you create your own social news site

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 … Read more

Digg gets carpet-bombed with Reddit news

Reading through my RSS feeds this morning, I noticed a reasonably large concentration of Diggs focused on Reddit's decision to go open source. Maybe someone thinks Digg's executive team actually reads through the froth?

I guess the real problem it points out is not a code problem with Digg, but rather a people problem, since the Digg system prompts the submitter to verify that the submission is unique. Perhaps these Reddit fans chose not to notice that scads of similar postings had already hit Digg? :-)

Open sourcing the web

Maybe it was just a matter of time. Yesterday Reddit went open source, but it's not alone: Facebook, eBay, Google, and other web companies have increasingly opened their platforms in various ways to achieve competitive advantage.

I've been one of the most vociferous opponents of the web companies "free-riding" on the backs of "open-source 1.0 projects," but it's increasingly clear that this phenomenon was a moment in time. A brief one.

The packaged software industry took decades to determine that open source is a winning strategy. (No, Savio Rodrigues, I'm not suggesting that it has settled on a 100 percent open-source strategy.) The web? Maybe three or four years.

Are we rapidly getting to the point where everything, including the web, will be flavored with open source to greater and lesser degrees? I think the answer is an unequivocal "Yes."… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 748: At play in the Web of Misery

Somehow today's show suddenly turned into a poetry slam, replete with economic gloom, the devastating hackery of coffee pots, and the slow creep of a fox on fire. All right, that's about enough of that annoying crap. In other news that may or may not be news, a new study finds that folks who are enthusiastic about technology may also be enthusiastically jerky. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 748

Flickr co-founders depart Yahoo http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9971209-7.html

Statistics show Firefox 3 spreading fast http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9971672-7.html http://mashable.com/2008/06/18/firefox-record/… Read more

Reddit chooses CPAL for open source license (Verdict: good move)

Reddit launched itself as an open source project today and chose the occasionally controversial CPAL license for the release.

There doesn't appear to be a goal of monetization as much as there is a goal of ubiquity through proliferation. If that were reversed there is no question that the GPL is a better choice.

I happen to think CPAL is exactly the right choice and here's why:

1. It's one of only 3 OSS licenses that take the "network" into account (CPAL, OSL, AGPL) whereby usage can be considered distribution. 2. It doesn't require … Read more

OurSignal puts the follies of social news all in one place

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 … Read more

Conde Nast's Reddit goes open-source

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).

"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 … Read more