First, if you want to get right down to it, here are the codes you type into Facebook chat to get various faces:

Huzzah! We are truly living in an age of wonder!

Second, why does this work?

There are various ways to bring Facebook content into chats. For example, you use Facebook Pages like a little TC by typing [[techcrunch]]. The numbers above are actually the IDs for pages that someone, for some terrible reason, made featuring all of those rage faces (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Poker-Face/129627277060203, for example). There are more to be found here thanks to Reddit so I’ll leave further discovery as an exercise for the reader.

All I can say is I’m glad there’s an Internet because the long minutes between sips of whiskey on Christmas Eve, spent staring malevolently at the fire, fingering my ratty smoking jacket, drawing from an unlit cheroot that had gone out hours before, and plotting the destruction of my many enemies would be a lot darker without the MeGusta face keeping me going. Happy holidays!

via Reddit [upvote Sky_Prodigy]

Folks who use iOS devices can enjoy the fine, fresh flavor of Reddit any time day or night with the official Reddit app. But what about Android users? What are they, chopped bacon?

BaconReader is a new Android reader produced by OneLouder. It is, as you’d expect, heavily text-based but it allows you to view your own account and submit news to Reddit as well as browse image links like a champ.

Why Reddit doesn’t have their own iReddit version for Android is beyond me, but there you have it. The free version includes ads but you can upgrade to ad-free for $1.99. Most important is this simple line that many wouldn’t notice in the product description and that I think shows the care and diligence these folks put into the app.

- Rageface and look of disapproval support

There are plenty of Android Reddit readers out there but this one looks to be a bit more polished, with color coded comment threads and full inbox support. Sure, it may not get you a date with I_am_the_cheese or highlight stuff that’s already been on 4chan, but it’s a native Android Reddit client and I’m sure it will go more than OK.

Created by a young man named Jonathan Bouman, Scrolldit is a thing that scrolls Reddit for you, thereby allowing you to avoid the hard, hard job of scrolling Reddit. Why, you ask, is this news? Because we like Reddit and it’s really cool.

The site essentially takes Reddit feeds (including NSFW ones, hurr hurr hurr) and places them in little boxes that march across the screen. Because most people don’t read too good, there are lots of pictures and the occasional video, available for easy and quick consumption. Most of the rendering happens in the browser and it even feeds in Reddit’s own ads.

We’re obviously talking about a mash-up here, but it’s rejiggerings like this that improve interfaces. While I doubt I’d ever use this on a daily basis – the current Reddit interface is good enough with the Reddit Enhancement Suite installed – in an era of popular mash-up apps like Pulse and Flipboard, the desktop hasn’t gotten much in the way of alternative interfaces.

The app uses jQuery Masonry and Amazon cloudfront and fetches using the JSON API. It’s unfunded because why would it be?

Happy Tuesday after Labor Day everybody! In other news, beloved Internet hangout reddit has spun out of Conde Nast and will become its own independent entity, reddit inc., owned by Condé Nast parent company Advance publications.

In a blog post coincidentally enough entitled “Independence,” reddit General Manager Erik Martin implies that the organizational change was due to a combination of technical issues related to company’s ever-expanding growth and a culture clash with Condé Nast.

“When reddit was acquired in October 2006 by Condé Nast, it was receiving about 700k page views per day,” Martin writes. “Now, reddit routinely gets that much traffic in 15 minutes. This explosion in traffic created technical, cultural, and organizational growing pains.”

According to Martin, reddit Inc. will now directly report to a board, which will include co-founder Alexis Ohanian, reddit President Bob Sauerberg, Condé Nast CTO Joe Simon and  Advance VP Andrew Siegel. Martin tells me that the company, which employs eight people out of its SF office and two out of NY with another salesperson based in LA, is looking for a new CEO in the Bay Area.

“It’ll be a much more direct process now, we go to the board like any other company and say that this is the business case for why we’re doing XYZ,” comments Martin on what he thinks will change organizationally moving forward. “It allows us to operate more independently,” he says.

Contrary to (hilarious) reports, Gawker writer Adrian Chen is not in the running for Reddit Editor In Chief.

After spending far too much time with far too little support from their owners at Condé Nast, Reddit is on a bit of a roll lately. They’ve gone on a handful of hiring sprees this year, moved into a bigger, better office… and now, they’ve made their first acquisition: RedditGifts.

For the non-Redditors out there (yeah, yeah, Narwhal bacons at Midnight and all that), RedditGifts is a user-to-user gift exchange service first launched by Redditor kickme444 for Reddit’s record-breaking Secret Santa back in 2009.

In each “Secret Santa” event, Redditors are automatically matched with one other Redditor, and are then tasked with figuring out something awesome to send that person’s way. Some lurk through their recipient’s comments for clues as to what they might like; others just make something neat and hope it works out. There are, of course, horror stories of people scamming the process for free crap and other tomfoolery — but for the most part, everyone plays friendly and it works out well.

Following the success of the first Secret Santa round (which pulled around 4,500 participants), RedditGifts followed up with a second in 2010, this time with over 17,000 gift-givers. Looking to keep the fun going outside of December, they also organized the totally secular and aptly named “Arbitrary Day”, which they describe as “a celebration of nothing in particular”. All gift exchanges combined, just shy of 43,000 people have participated, with around $1.5 million (plus a ton of man-hours, as so many of the gifts are handmade) spent on gifts.

So, why the acquisition? What’s in it for Reddit? In short, RedditGifts’ two-person team just couldn’t afford to keep maintaining the project while also working their day jobs.. so now RedditGifts is their day job. Reddit gets to keep an awesome, well-established, largely-self-driven source of community bonding, and the RedditGifts team gets to do what they were doing before… but for money. Everyone wins!

RedditGifts will continue to operate under the same two-person team (Dan “kickme444″ McComas and Jessica “5days” Moreno), remain on the same domain, and neither will be involved with the daily operations of Reddit proper. The only things expected to change: RedditGifts will eventually go opensource (Reddit already is), and the whole thing should lead to better integration (namely, easier sign-ups) in the longrun.

No word yet if any money (beyond salaries, benefits and the like) actually traded hands for this acquisition, or if this is more of an acquisition-by-hire — either way, it’s not a bad deal for a project initially launched overnight on a whim.

The team has now responded to plenty of questions, offering some insight into where Google’s free online productivity suite is headed over the coming months. Sure, they’re being a little vague with some of their answers, but they still hint at plenty of nifty upcoming features. Here are some of the highlights so far:

Regarding an offline version of Google Docs:

“You’re going to see offline start to roll out later this summer. We used to have offline with Google Gears, but it became pretty clear that plugins weren’t the right approach. We’ve been reimplementing offline using HTML5 standards like AppCache, File API, and IndexDB.

We’re some of the first webapps that are really putting those standards to the test, so it’s taken a while to iron out the kinks.”

…

Well, we will launch in whatever incremental pieces make sense. But the long term direction is if you access a Doc URL while offline, it should open the local copy of the doc and let you edit. When you go online all your edits get synced in the background. You should also be able to see a list of your docs while offline. We’ll need to work through all the tricky problems with how to merge conflicting edits. It’s fun stuff.

Regarding how data stored in Google Docs is kept safe:

Document data is stored in a storage system built on top of Bigtable. Storage is distributed across many machines and geographic locations, and all access to the underlying storage is tightly controlled and audited in compliance with SAS70. For more details, I’ll refer you to this set of FAQs.

Cloud print will be coming to more devices (right now it’s only on mobile and Chromebooks).

The most topic so far appears to be ‘mobile;. The general theme of the answers is that there’s a lot of work being done in this area to make the experience better. Among them: it sounds like the Android Google Docs app will be getting a native editor (right now it kicks you off to a web editor, which is clunky). It sounds like offline editing will also be possible using the native app.

Another smaller (but important) feature: the team plans to improve the flow of naming new documents. Right now it’s pretty easy to wind up with dozens of files called ‘Untitled document’ — the team is currently figuring out the best way to solve this.

Color gets bashed as being a contributing player to the so called startup bubble and the frat-boy attitude of investors from the Web 1.0 era don’t do much better in this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon and Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who is now with Y Combinator and Hipmunk.

In a conversation spanning a variety of topics, you’ll hear Ohanian describe how “Lord Jobs” has indirectly contributed to the success of Zappos and Instagram, the gaping opportunities for start-ups to solve, and the attitude adjustment seen in present day investors; swinging a big load of cash (and something else) doesn’t cut it with this class of start-ups.

Make sure to watch the clip to hear insights on the above – and why we might expect to see a softer landing if the speculated bubble ever bursts.

Below, Ohanian describes his leadership style, why he thinks start-ups fail (it has more to do with just “bad logos” says Ohanian when pressed by Dixon) and what Ohanian looks for when hiring.

Past episodes of Dixon’s interview with Ohanian are here and here.

Prior Founder Stories interviews with leaders such as Seth Sternberg, Mike Walrath and Dennis Crowley are here.

Alexis Ohanain continues his coversation with Founder Stories host Chris Dixon by discussing some of his activities and interests outside of Reddit.

Highlights of their chat include Ohanian telling Dixon he considers Paul Newman, “the OG of social enterprise” and that Newman was the inspiration for Breadpig, Ohanian’s organization that creates “geeky things” and donates profits to worthy causes.  On his role as the Y Combinator ambassador to New York, where Ohanian mentors budding New York-based Y Combinator founders, Ohanian notes “you can’t spell New York City without YC” and on founding his angel investing firm Das Kapital Capital, Ohanian says he did it, “mostly so I can mess with the tellers of Bank of America—are you a communist?”

It is a breezy and entertaining episode where the two go on to discuss World of WarCraft, Everquest and an interesting guerilla advertising campaign deployed by the Y Combinator company Grubwithus.  The two conclude with Ohanian telling Dixon the key ingredient Ohanian must have before doing a start-up.

In the video below, Ohanian talks about “taking the agony out of travel search” with Hipmunk—where Ohanian serves as the marketing director, his mixed emotions about marketing and the power of word of mouth advertising.

In case you missed part I of Dixon’s interview with Ohanian you can find it here.

Prior episodes of Founder Stories with Soraya Darabi, Kevin Ryan and Christopher Poole are here.

In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Reddit Founder, Alexis Ohanian takes Dixon back to his college days at the University of Virginia where he and co-founder Steve Huffman bonded over video games and began plotting ways to avoid taking a real job after graduation.

Not wanting to be holed-up in a cubicle for 50 years, they submitted an idea to Y Combinator, the idea got rejected, they got accepted, and together began building around the concept of “people deliberately trying to find and share new and interesting stuff online” says Ohanian.

Joking about “competitive analysis” Ohanian tells Dixon he wasn’t even familiar with Digg until “about a week or two after we had launched” and says interestingly enough, “it was this classic example of alright, you’ve launched, it turns out there is someone else who is in your space, who has already got a significant advantage, and you know, that is not time to quit, that is just time to keep doing what you are doing.”

The boys kept on doing, and did quite well. Less than two years after launching they sold Reddit to Conde Nast and Ohanian says Reddit is currently tallying “1.3-billion page views per month.”

Make sure to watch the full episode for additional insights.

In the below interview, Ohanian offers thoughts on the future of Reddit from his vantage point as a consultant and tells Dixon how Reddit makes money.

Past episodes of Founder Stories with such leaders as Fred Wilson, Perry Chen and Lauren Leto are here.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post submitted by Mahendra Palsule, who has worked as an Editor at Techmeme since 2009. Apart from curating tech news, he likes analyzing trends in startups and the social web. He is based in Pune, India, and you can follow him on Twitter.

What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?

This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.

The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it.

Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload.

The above matrix is a representation of how the process of online information discovery has evolved over time.

Phase I: The Search Dominated Web

This is how Google began its dominance over the web two decades ago, using PageRank to surface the most popular web pages as identified by other web pages that linked to them.

Phase II: Web 2.0 With Social Bookmarking

In the Web 2.0 era, social bookmarking services gained significant traction, surfacing popular content. Sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon are hugely popular even today, driving millions of page views.

Phase III: Personalized Recommendations

Services like Hunch, GetGlue, etc. have focused on building an Interest Graph for users, to deliver personalized recommendations using a ‘taste engine’.

Phase IV: Personalized Serendipity

The latest crop of startups is focusing on personalization using a combination of Interest and Social Graphs. Personalized Serendipity is what Jeff Jarvis calls ‘Unexpected Relevance’. Examples include Gravity, my6sense, Genieo, and TrapIt.

What Exactly Is Relevance?

The battle against information overload is sometimes presented as a choice between Relevance and Popularity, where ‘relevant’ is equated to ‘personalized’ as against popular.

However, Relevance does not always mean Personalized. Relevance is very dynamic – it depends on the needs of a person at a specific point in time. There are times when users want to know about the most popular stories, and other times when they seek personalized content.

There are multiple approaches to filtering information for Relevant Content. Google, Paper.li, and PostRank are examples of algorithmic filtering, while Reddit, Hacker News use a crowdsourcing approach. Klout can be used to filter Twitter streams by influence, while Facebook uses social affinity as a filter for its newsfeed and social signals for its new Comments Plugin. Location is another high-impact signal for delivering relevant content, gaining importance in a mobile world.

In other words, Relevance spans across all the quadrants of the Discovery Matrix above, and none of the above approaches to filtering for relevance is the ‘best approach’. There is no killer approach to Relevance. Henry Nothhaft, Jr., CMO of TrapIt, described it as “the myth of the sweet spot”. The competitive edge will be with services that support multiple discovery methods, multiple filtering approaches, have flexibility, and support multiple mobile platforms.

Quora: A Showcase Of The Interest Graph

Quora has pioneered the use of the Interest Graph as a dominant signal for its newsfeed. Quora asks new users to select Topics to follow, as part of its onboarding process, which is the first revelation that Topics are as important as Users to follow.

Quora’s newsfeed is an interesting showcase of what happens when you mix an Interest Graph with a Social Graph – and the result is the mysterious addictiveness so many have experienced, but found difficult to explain. An item pops up in your newsfeed not because you were following a user, but because you were following a related topic.

This often leads to Personalized Serendipity – or Unexpected Relevance – which is why Quora gets many people hooked.

The war over the Interest Graph began between Twitter and Facebook last year, as Erick described so eloquently. So how did Quora beat them to this game?

For starters, Quora is built from the ground-up with the Interest Graph being a backbone of the framework. Twitter’s ‘Browse Interests’ is too broad and primitive to be of use, even at present. And while Facebook has a mechanism for allowing publishers to push new items to your feed, most publishers have been unaware of this functionality.

This is also the reason why Facebook’s Like Button now publishes a full news feed story. The future clearly belongs to who best captures the Interest Graph as Max Levchin and Bill Gurley put it.

The implications of a Relevance-driven web are wide-ranging and broad in scope. Better utilization of the Interest Graph by services will lead to better ad targeting, and a potential decrease in reliance on CPM/CPC-based advertising. Monetization focus will be on higher yields through transactions and subscriptions as Dave McClure once described. Online media publishers will focus on Relevance Metrics revealing engagement and time-spent on site, than primitive metrics like page views and traffic.

Social media may lose its obsession with follower numbers and traffic, evolving to context-driven reputation systems and algorithms.

Interest Graphs will be used to build Better Social Graphs. Today’s monolithic Interest Graph will get further specialized into Taste Graphs, Financial Graphs, Local Network Graphs, etc., yielding higher relevance for different needs.

The Age of Relevance beckons!

Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv.

Right now I’m neck deep in product launch mode, putting the finishing touches on our new mobile video application—Socialcam. Of course, I’ve been here before . . .

Years ago when we launched the Justin.tv show we had no idea what we were doing. This much was obvious to anyone who watched. Outsiders attribute far more strategic thought to the venture than we gave it. Some think that we planned all along to start a live platform, and that the Justin.tv show itself was a way of promoting that platform. While this ended up happening, none of it had crossed our minds at the time.

Emmett Shear and I had been working on Kiko, the first Javascript web calendaring application in the Microsoft Outlook style. We prototyped the application in our final year at Yale, went on to raise money from Y Combinator, then continued working on it for over a year.

Then Google Calendar was released—boom—absorbing most of our nascent user base and capturing most of the early adopter mindshare. But to be perfectly honest, Kiko would have failed regardless. We were too easily distracted and hadn’t really thought through the strategic implications of owning a standalone calendaring property (hint: no one wants a calendar without email). A short time later we were burned out and spending most of our time playing Xbox with the Reddit guys in Davis Square—hardly a startup success story.

Emmett and I started thinking about possible ways to get out of the calendar business. At the same time, I was startup fatigued. We had spent over a year paying ourselves nothing. The seed and angel investment market conditions were the polar opposite of what they are today. It had been a struggle to even raise a paltry $70,000, and we had failed to build a product with real traction. I was starting to think about moving back to Seattle to try something new, maybe in a different industry.

Still, we learned a ton and it was fun to be part of the early Y Combinator startup community (then largely in Boston). We became friends with Matt Brezina and Adam Smith (of Xobni), Trip Adler, Tikhon Bernstam and Jared Friedman (of Scribd), and many others. It’s amazing to see how many of those friendships persist today, and even more amazing how well many of those companies are doing.

Coming back from one particular YC dinner, Emmett and I were discussing strategic ideas for Kiko, and I remember telling Emmett an idea that popped into my head: what if you could hear an audio feed on the web of our discussion? Wouldn’t that be interesting to other like-minded entrepreneurial types? We kept going, and eventually the idea morphed into a video feed. Then it became a live video feed. Then it became a continuous live video feed that followed someone around 24/7. Then it had chat, and a community built around watching this live show, which was now a new form of entertainment. I was hooked.

I couldn’t stop talking about the idea. I mentioned it at YC dinners and to other friends. I even came up with a perfect name for it: Justin.tv. On one trip to DC, I told my Dad and my college friend Michael Seibel what I was thinking. Eventually, in-between drinking sessions, we thought of a brilliant idea for divesting ourselves of Kiko, which is a story for another day. After that, Emmett and I were coming up with other startup ideas (I guess we got excited about staying in the industry after all). One particular favorite was the idea of a web app that would ingest your blog’s RSS feed and then allow you to layout and print physical magazines from it. Excitedly, we drove one afternoon to Paul Graham’s house to pitch it.

We explained the idea to Paul and Robert Morris, who just happened to be at the house visiting. I vaguely recall there also being a “this will kill academic publishing” angle, although I can’t figure out how that sensibly fits in now. Paul didn’t particularly like the idea: he didn’t think people would use it. “Well,” he said, “what else do you have?”

I said the only thing I could think of: “Justin.tv.”

Because it was something I was clearly passionate about, and because creating a new form of entertainment was clearly a big market (if you could invent one!), Paul was actually into it. Robert’s addition to the conversation was “I’ll fund that just to see you make a fool of yourself.” Emmett and I walked out of there with a check for $50,000.

Six months later, we’d recruited two other cofounders (Kyle Vogt, our hardware hacker, who we convinced to drop out of MIT on a temporary leave of absence, and Michael Seibel, my college friend from DC, who became our “producer”). We built a site with a video player and chat and two prototype cameras that captured, encoded and streamed live video over cell data networks, negotiated with a CDN to carry our live video traffic, and raised an additional couple hundred thousand dollars. Our plan? Launch the show and see what happens.

Now, let me just tell you why this was a bad idea:

• We didn’t have a plan. We loosely figured if the show became popular we could sell sponsorships or advertising, but we didn’t have a plan to scale the number of shows, nor did we understand what our marginal costs on streaming, customer acquisition, or actually selling ads were.
• We didn’t understand the industry. We didn’t know what kinds of content advertisers would pay for. We didn’t have good insight into what kind of content people wanted to watch, either.
• We relied on proprietary hardware that we were going to mass-produce ourselves. Smart angels told us to drop the hardware and figure out how to do it with commodity equipment, but we wouldn’t listen because we thought hardware would be easy (or at least, doable). Ironically, months after we were told this we switched to using a laptop.
• We were trying to build a “hits” based business without any experience making hits. We knew a lot about websites, but little about content creation. Smart VCs (who took our calls because Paul referred us) told us as much: nobody really likes investing in hits based businesses, because it requires the continual generation of new hits to be successful (instead of, say, building a platform like eBay or Google whose success is built on masses of regular users).

How did we get as far as we did?

• We were passionate. We honestly believed we could create a new form of reality entertainment. Put to the side that we had no experience with creating video (or any kind of content), by God, we were going to make this work.
• Early stage investing is often about the people, not the idea. Paul has said as much about what he looks for. As two-time YC founders he knew that we worked well together and even if we were working on something totally inane we were going to stick it out with the company and iterate until we found a business model.
• We sold the shit out of it. Everyone we knew was excited for Justin.tv. Why? Because our excitement was infectious. That’s how we got Kyle to drop out of school. That’s how we got Michael to quit his job and move across the country.

Ultimately, the show failed. But all told, I’m thankful every day that things went the way they did. Why?

• We built a strong team. The four of us started, and the four of us all still have leadership roles in the company. Along the way we recruited the smartest engineers and best product designers we could find.
• We were willing to learn, and to pivot. After quickly realizing the initial show wasn’t a sustainable model, we decided to go the platform route, and built the world’s largest live video platform (both on the web and in our mobile apps, which have millions of downloads).
• It got us started. Some people wait until the stars are aligned before they jump in. Maybe that’s the right move, but plenty of businesses get started with something that seems implausible, stupid, or not-a-real-business but turn into something of value (think Groupon). If we hadn’t started then, would we have later?

Today, I’m more excited about Justin.tv than I’ve been at any time since we launched the initial platform. Why? We’re taking everything we’ve gathered and learned over the past four and half years building the largest live video platform on the Web (17 million monthly unique visitors in Dec according to comScore’s MediaMetrix), and applying it to tackle a new generation of problems in mobile video. Our world class web and mobile engineering team, all of our product development knowledge, our substantial, scaled video infrastructure, and everything we’ve learned about building engineering teams has all been put to work on a new app that we think is going to change everything.

Our new app is called Socialcam, but that’s another story.

Photo by Terry Chay

By most accounts, the past several years under Conde Nast rule have seen Reddit run very lean — probably far too lean. And after an explosion of growth this past year, they’re finally doing something about it. Earlier this week, the service revealed that they had carried out a “dramatic expansion” of hiring by adding four new team members. And today they’re announcing their intention to double the programming team by adding three more there as well.

Specifically, Reddit wants a frontend programmer, a backend programmer, and someone in between. And in typically quirky Reddit fashion, the way to apply is interesting.

Instead of sending in your resume, they’re asking would-be employees to solve one of two problems. The first asks you to clone Reddit. Yep, they want you to build a copy of their service — one that works. The second problem asks you to rebuild the backend tool that they use to find gamers of their system.

If you can do either, then you earn the right to send them your resume. Doing it the other way around (the normal way), is like ”trying to pick the best cellphone by comparing the manufacturers’ press releases,” the company says. Good point.

For the rest of the details about the problems as well as more about the jobs, check out Reddit’s post.

So why all the Reddit love from Conde Nast all of a sudden? The aforementioned growth this past year is key, but we also hear it may have something to do with Sarah Chubb, the long-time president of Conde Nast’s digital arm, leaving the company.

There’s at least a dozen “better late than never” jokes in here somewhere.

Google has officially rolled out Chrome 9, meaning the stable version of the browser has been updated to that iteration. They don’t make any mention of the number in the blog post about the update, but trust me, it’s version 9. Instead, Google focuses on the three new major features available to all in this build: WebGL, Chrome Instant, and the Chrome Web Store.

Many users will already be familiar with all of those as they’ve been on the beta builds of Chrome for a while, and the dev builds longer before that. But still, each is worth noting as all three are now a pretty integral part of the Chrome experience. WebGL brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics support. Chrome Instant brings Google Instant support to the Omnibox. And the Chrome Web Store is part of Google plans to push web apps farther.

But the more humorous part of the release comes from the Google Chrome Releases blog post. This post details the bug fixes that have come in Chrome 9. And in it, Google gives a special shout-out to the Reddit community for pointing out one critical bug. As Google notes:

Special thanks to the Reddit community, for playing so much of the game “Z-Type” that they uncovered a Chromium audio bug — see below!

Below, they detail the bug:

[69195] Critical Race condition in audio handling. Credit to the gamers of Reddit!

So there you go, while it wasn’t an “elite” bug or even a “l33t” one, it’s fun to see Google given credit to another service for pointing out their flaws.

It’s stories like this – stories that would once rate a few feature pages in Discover magazine or Omni (remember Omni?) – that are now percolating through the Internet, to our benefit and to the detriment of old media who can’t keep up. Now we get the real story sans any nonsense graphics, anticlimactic taglines or fluff. It’s the future, everyone.

Saying that the Internet is killing traditional media is disingenuous at best. The Internet herself isn’t the antagonist, nor are the traditional media companies that are swiftly making online a priority. It’s the independent sites fueled by nothing but raw passion and curiosity that are transforming news consumption.

VBS.TV picked up the story early last year and produced an 18 minute video about the NASA’s undersea Atlantica Expeditions. Of course the video had the outlet’s trademark high production values and direct-but-honest approach. This is what VBS.TV does. They find an off-beat subject and cover it properly. See their coverage of North Korea. Or the art of nude photography. (NSFW) Or The Aquatic Life of Dennis Chamberland.

This particular video was produced under VBS.TV’s Motherboard.tv channel, where the site’s editor, Alex Pasternack, told me that they focus mainly on “The weird and exciting side of technology.” They discovered this man while searching for a story on undersea living and colonies. It was the perfect fit for Motherboard.tv: a quaint backstory, great shooting location, and a man with words “NASA Bioengineer” on his business card.

This video and blog post were the result of the meeting. National Geographic went on to run a similar story in the Fall of 2010 that explored the subject in a broader sense over multiple episodes, but still (albeit less prominently) features Mr. Chamberland.

This is what VBS.TV and its shows like Motherboard.tv do. During the previous season, just the Motherboard.tv team was outing one featured documentary a week while simultaneously managing a clever website — which follows the same guiding principle but allows for user-submitted posts — that saw 500k unique visitors in December 2010. VBS.TV is a go-to alternative news outlet where this sort of stuff is the norm.

But here we are today when, nearly nine months later when Dennis Chamberland’s son encouraged the NASA bioengineer to do an IAMA on Reddit. Welcome, to the Internet, Mr. Chamberland.

Reddit is famous for their community of honest and curious users. These IAMA posts — Internet speak for “I am a [insert profession or human trait]” — are part of what makes Reddit great. Anyone from random users with an interesting story or celebrities do these sort FAQ posts. The purpose is that Reddit users are then open to ask questions that the IAMA will then answer. Reddit’s effective user moderation system then filters the good from the bad, resulting in an sincere, mostly flame-free, Internet conversation.

It’s this sort of interaction on Reddit, and story production and discovery from VBS, that is driving the Internet past traditional media. Take away the VBS.TV video and this NASA engineer could have still seen similar results and satisfying interaction on Reddit as Internet users crave new and fresh content.

Old media moving to the web and even blogs like us are not the so-called killers of print media. It’s the ability to bypass news outlets altogether and interact directly with the story or subject that will slowly draw attention away from the establishment.

The old standbys did pick up this story. National Geographic did their series on it, but watch it after the Vice video. One is frank, genuine and direct. The other is filled with fancy graphics and lots of filler. Then yesterday, on January 12th, CNN ran the story as part of their partnership with Vice but failed to add anything new to the story.

It’s not just Vice and Reddit. It’s Twitter and Facebook in a broader sense. It’s athletes interacting with fans on Twitter and Sarah Palin’s Facebook soapbox. It’s increasingly easier for the average world citizen to derive their own conclusion about a subject directly from the source and not through a news outlet’s political or corporate filter.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but it’s interesting to note that one man’s quirky job became a meme, then a news topic, then a topic of general conversation. The news cycle isn’t dead, it’s just happening in new places.

Reddit has increasingly become a favorite haunt of many in the social media community, especially since competitor Digg’s v4 redesign underwhelmed both its casual and core users leading to an exodus in September. Digg which was worth $170 million earlier in the year, is now valued at just $102 million. The site still has more monthly unique visits than Reddit, according to Comscore.

Says power Digger and active Reddit user Victor Barrera, “I think Reddit’s growth can be atrributed to a couple main factors: Digg’s decline and a multitude of improvements and upgrades that really played into the scalability of their platform.”

It’s no surprise that Reddit’s emphasis on a steadily increasing its userbase is now reflected in increased traffic and site time per visit (by 2 minutes and 40 seconds). But can the company sustain these monumental numbers in 2011, with no major competitor downfall in site?

Barrera thinks so, “I think at the moment that the damage to Digg and the ensuing benefits for Reddit are pretty much near the end of that road. Reddit, in a way, is kind of in the driver’s seat. Uptime, scalability, and improving their platform from a technology perspective are what they’re trying to focus on the most. It’s a very “if you build it they will come” kind of thing.”

Editor’s note: Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple).

One of the most interesting concepts to emerge in media and tech lately is that of “serendipity”—showing people what they want even if they didn’t ask for it.

Despite its seemingly ubiquitous invocation, however, the concept of serendipity remains ill-defined and put forth as some vague panacea for a slew of emerging innovations hoping to attract new users in droves.  What is needed is a closer look at what we actually mean when we talk about serendipity.

From Search to Discovery

Eric Schmidt’s recent remarks about Google as a “Serendipity Engine” (and Facebook’s quick reply), emphasize an important shift in our daily interaction with the Web and how we use it.  Google-driven search provided us with an expectation of finding what we are looking for with increased precision.  But the rise of Facebook’s social relevance algorithms brought about more personalized content discovery based on the human graph—who we know and what they are reading, watching, or passing along.

In fact, I’d argue that we’re seeing the dominant portion of our interaction with Web content shift from search to discovery.

Jeff Jarvis has perhaps most succinctly defined the concept of serendipity, arguing that serendipity is simply “unexpected relevance.”  His explanation opens an entirely new can of worms, however, in the recognition that relevance is relative.

In seeking to achieve serendipity, the individual reader becomes both the target of content delivery mechanisms and the genesis of what that content may be. This is why serendipity is so closely associated with personalization—it requires a high-resolution understanding of the user.

Serendipity and personalization are in fact two sides to the same coin.  Personalization merely acknowledges intimacy, whereas serendipity pretends to have happened on it as if by accident.

Of course serendipity is not, in fact, at all random. In reality, it’s quite scientific. Good serendipity is a slight of hand—it requires deep and granular knowledge, and the fact of its seeming to happen by accident is an artifact of naivety, if anything.

Serendipity is really just an informed calculation based upon any number of our individually unique interests, habits, location, the time and date, and prior knowledge. This level of relevance is, of course, what the emerging personalized Web hopes to achieve for each user, whether for recommendations (GetGlue; Hunch), marketing and ads (Rapleaf; Facebook advertising), or news and content (my company, TrapIt).

Below I run through four different kinds of serendipity—each has its pros and cons. I end by talking about them all taken together, and “the myth of the sweet spot”.

Editorial Serendipity

Editorial Serendipity is the first and oldest form, the process of combining articles that we know we want to read (the day’s headlines) with unexpected stories (features, profiles, restaurant reviews). Yet the editorial voice and direction of a paper or aggregator is hardly serendipitous; it is a calculation of demographics and readership, whether you’re the New York Times, the Drudge Report, or TechCrunch.

On the plus side here, the human element of editorial serendipity (someone making decisions on what content to deliver) provides an effective flexibility of interest. The downside is that editorial serendipity is delivered by another’s interests, or at best their perception of their audience’s interests. Though the content’s relevance is targeted to a certain demographic of readers, it is a necessarily broad sweep of potential readers, and the level of interest is based on the editors’ perception of what is most in tune with those readers or what she thinks they should be interested in based on her own judgement.

Examples: Newspapers/Magazines, Curated Aggregators

Social Serendipity

Much of our content discovery now comes from the virtual watercooler of what our social circle is sharing directly online. The social aspect of staying informed with what our friends are discussing is valuable, not only for keeping “in the loop,” but also simply for the notion that what our friends like is parallel to our own interests.

The benefit of social serendipity is that our social groups have always been a primary indicator of how we choose to define ourselves and our interests. If something is important or relevant to our friends, there is a high likelihood that it is also relevant to ourselves, as well. The con is that social serendipity is therefore largely public by necessity, and thus a projection of ourselves we would present to others or like to be seen. The propensity to amplify the echo-chamber of like-mindedness is also exaggerated, whereas the goal of serendipity largely lies in the surprise and delight of unexpected content.

Examples: Facebook, Twitter

Crowdsourced Serendipity

Bridging the gap between editorial and social serendipity, the notion of crowdsourced relevance really only delivers a broad, lowest-common-denominator level of content discovery. While not without its usefulness to the degree that we want to be aware of what is most popular and most talked about, the trade-off is the lack of personalization.

The pro here is the viral component, which makes up a great deal of our online content-discovery routines. Crowdsourced serendipity provides a tier of distribution in touch with a larger zeitgeist, from trivial cat videos to important broad-based news. The downside is that the lowest common denominator lacks any precision and therefore has limited utility.

Examples: StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg

Algorithmic Serendipity

Opposite editorial serendipity, the notion of algorithmic serendipity is the hardest to do well, but the most promising for future innovation. (Bias alert: this is the approach we are trying at TrapIt)

Based-upon any given set of data points, content is personalized to provide both the relevant, need-to-know information of news and content correlating to our interests, with varying degrees of flexibility through both active and passive inputs.

The best aspect of algorithmic serendipity is that it places the user back at the center of defining relevance. Content delivery emanates from the user, whether consciously or in the background based on habit. It also provides for a level of adjustability and fine-tuning based on individualized input and how narrowly or broadly a user may want the information delivered to him.

The con with algorithmic serendipity is that we need to be careful not to completely lose the human element of engagement, no matter how accurate the algorithm is. Of course, the biggest hindrance is that unlike the other forms of serendipity, a finely-tuned algorithmic Serendipity Engine has yet to be effectively realized. Still, it needs to only be the starting point rather than end point of achieving personalized serendipity.

Examples: Genieo, My6Sense, TrapIt

The Myth of the Sweet Spot

The challenge for any conception of serendipity, regardless of type, is the prevailing notion of a mythical “sweet spot” for users.

In all of the forms of content delivery outlined above, there is a notion that we can hone in on a user’s interests and find the right balance of relevance.  Presenting any such balance as stable or definitive is pure folly. We humans have no “sweet spot”—our interests are evolving and fluid in realtime.

To some extent, this recognition is obvious. Our interests change and evolve over time. Yet for the kind of precision that seeks to provide consistent serendipity in the ways we have been discussing, the indicators need to be equally sensitive.

The content that I want, and better yet, the content that I don’t even know that I want, is an ever-changing proposition based on any number of factors. To achieve that level of sophisticated customization requires a sensitive understanding of context for any proposed “serendipity engine”, both a context of the content and the user.

In the end, relevance is a goal based on context. The impossibility of fully understanding every intricacy of context at any given moment makes achieving the mythical, consistent sweet spot of serendipity impossible. Recognizing that serendipity is a constantly moving target of context, the best we can hope to achieve are fleeting moments relevance.

Photo credit: Flickr/Jennifer Konig

But why is Slowe leaving now?

Reddit’s traffic has been hitting record highs in the wake of Digg’s failed redesign, so the timing on this seems strange. In a blog post announcing the move, Slowe writes that his “parting with [Reddit parent company] Condé Nast has been nothing but amicable”. But given the issues the companies have had recently this is hard to believe — so I got in touch with Slowe to get a better handle on the situation.

Slowe claims that the differences Reddit had with Condé Nast over the summer have been largely resolved. Until recently, Condé had been very restrictive when it came to allowing Reddit to hire additional developers (the company has been severely understaffed for a long time), but in the coming weeks there will be blog posts announcing additional open positions. “I feel like we’re at the top of the hump,” he says.

Slowe also notes that his job position will be left open for someone else to claim — when Reddit’s original founders left a year ago, existing personnel had to absorb their responsibilities because of a hiring freeze. And, as further evidence of the goodwill between them, Slowe says that even after he leaves he’ll be available to Reddit on a contractual basis.

But despite these positive changes at Reddit, I still don’t buy Slowe’s claims that the companies’ differences have been resolved — I’ve heard multiple times that Reddit still hasn’t gotten the resources it probably deserves from Condé Nast. But I do believe Slowe’s second reason for his departure — he’s ready for another adventure:

I decided to leave mostly because it was time to do something new. Five years in technology is a long time anywhere, and, without suggesting that reddit is a completed project or anything but a continuously moving and evolving target, it was time to move onto something that is less fully formed with room to explore. That, and [Hipmunk founder] Steve Huffman really has been bugging me to join hipmunk for months.

Finally, Slowe talked a bit about the Digg redesign and the impact it’s had on Reddit (and why not everyone over there is throwing high-fives):

Though it’s been a windfall for reddit traffic-wise (having just last month exceeded 10M uniques and 420M impressions for the first time), it really did make me sad to watch the whole thing happen. Intercommunity animosity has been at worst a playful rivalry for years, and we’ve respected one another’s space. Seeing their front page turn from an active, vibrant community forum into a virtual ghost town in such a short time is, frankly, terrifying to watch (being in an analogous space as we are). It reminded us that there is no room to rest on our laurels, and it is the community as much as the content that makes the site.

Digg founder Kevin Rose cheerfully responds to the mountains of criticism around the newly launched Digg 4. His overall theme is that users need to deal with it.

Rose says that he’s “gotta take risk” with the service in his quest to push it beyond the 30 million or so monthly visitors to the masses. He wants 20,000 – 30,000 diggs on the top stories v. the few hundred diggs that most top stories get today. To do that Digg is pushing stories that it thinks are more relevant to you, because people and entities you follow have pushed those stories, too. It’s a lot like Twitter, most say, and the soul of Digg is gone.

Rose also says he’s fine with people leaving. “If Reddit is your new home and it’s something you really enjoy I’m all for that,” he says.

He also talks about scaling issues, pointing out that Digg has at least 500 servers in its various data centers. All engineers are focused on making the site stable, he says, and they have no time to rebuild old popular features like upcoming stories. After that, though, he says upcoming stories is coming back soon.

We’ve embedded the show above, you can watch it on Revision3 here.

In the wake of Digg’s bungled redesign, its rival is enjoying a surge in traffic and a jump in ad and subscription sales. Since Monday, the site has been averaging 900,000 uniques per day— a 50% increase from Reddit’s pre-”Digg 4″ average, according to senior programmer, Chris Slowe. The six-member team does not openly celebrate the technical woes of its competitor but there is a certain giddiness in the air at Reddit’s SF headquarters (a small room, tucked in the corner of Wired’s expansive office).

The Conde Nast owned startup is having a moment, and they know it.

However, there’s no time to bask in glory, as the number of page views rises and the press rolls out headlines like, “Backlash Continues For Digg as Reddit Steps in and Reaps the Benefits,” “Report: Reddit Ready To Defeat Digg‎,” and “New Digg Sucks? Reddit All Over Digg FrontPage Now!” No, for the four-person engineer team, it’s time to roll-up their sleeves and crank away, to keep the site afloat (no easy task) and create the next whizz-bang features to keep Reddit’s enlarged user base happy.

On Thursday, we dropped by their offices for a pulse check. While programmer David King’s eyes were glued to his monitor— tweaking a feature that will hopefully improve the site’s scalability— senior programmer Chris Slowe was available to take our questions, video above.

Highlights:

-Slowe says they first noticed a spike in traffic on Sunday night, as activity increased in Australia. By the close of Monday, Reddit saw 850,000 unique visitors, that number increased on Tuesday, with 900,000. Traffic has continued to hover around this level, with roughly 13 to 14 million total page views per day.

-Self-serve ads are up 30% since Digg 4′s launch. Overall ad sales have been growing roughly 5% per month, Slowe expects monthly sales to increase 5 to 10% for the remainder of this year. Subscriptions are also up, currently Reddit has 10,000 subscribers.

-Their prayer for more resources is finally being answered. They are currently in the process of hiring one new employee, but hope to have enough cash on hand to hire two full-time employees by year’s end.

-On Digg’s fumble, Slowe says: “I think the biggest complaint from their community has been that they feel marginalized…The only advice I would really give them…they haven’t been as communicative as they could be…Our only currency really is trust and candor and so if you treat your community like adults they’ll behave like adults.”

-On that whole Proposition 19 debacle: “Once the dust settled everything was just fine nobody’s been fired, everyone is perfectly happy. The main problem was that it was all happening very fast. It went from a blog post from the Prop 19 guys to a full blown community revolt on Reddit in about an hour… One of the problems with trying to be candid at all times, is that sometimes private political arguments end up public…we could have been a little bit more graceful in the handling of that.

-On the next feature for Reddit: “Our UI is not particularly friendly…we’d like to work on some tools to make it more friendly…another thing that’s been big is that its not necessarily clear off the bat that Reddit is customizable we have a whole bunch of communities and they all have different bends and you can subscribe to different communities…I think that’s not necessarily clear from a first look.”

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian will be taking a position at early stage venture firm Y Combinator, the company will announce later today.

Ohanian left Reddit, one of the first Y Combinator startups (acquired by Conde Nast in 2007), in 2009. He’s not returning to do another startup, like cofounder Steve Huffman did earlier this year with Hipmunk. Rather, he’ll be taking a position with Y Combinator itself. And he may continue to work on other projects as well.

His new position, based in New York, will be Y Combinator’s Ambassador to the East where he will be meeting with East coast applicants and generally representing Y Combinator.

Since leaving Conde Nast in 2009, Alexis has focused on his social enterprise, Breadpig, which has generated over $150,000 for charities.

Ohanian is one of the more passionate and audacious young entrepreneurs in tech today. He’ll get along very well with potential applicants, we suspect, and generally represent Y Combinator well over on the other side of America.

Y Combinator should confirm shortly, we’ll update when they do.

Update: Y Combinator blog post announcing that Ohanian is joining.