Nickelodeon Artists Takes Reddit Cartoon Requests

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Reddit Cartoon RequestsNickelodeon storyboard artist and Reddit user “thewondercat” recently started an AMA (Ask Me Anything)  session on Reddit and through that session he received some unique ideas that were later posted in the form of altered cartoon characters.

In his thread he started by posting:

“IAmA Nickelodeon Storyboard Artist. AMA and I’ll draw it”.

What ensued was 5 hours of constant sketching that ended up created 22 drawings that were all posted for the world to see.

After completing his drawing marathon the artist wrote:

“I drew for about 5 hours and got tons of requests. I wish I could’ve drawn everyone’s but hey, maybe I’ll just have to do this again sometime. I just finished drawing a request for a little girl’s birthday this weekend and I think that’s a good note to go out on.” [Read more…]

Former Reddit Employee Indicted For Data Theft

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Reddit LogoAaron Swartz, a former employee at popular link sharing website Reddit was indicted this week for data theft after it was found that he had stolen more than 4 million documents from MIT and the academic journal and paper archive JSTOR.

District of Massachusetts Carmen M. Ortiz filed charges against Swartz after determining that he had broken into MIT to steal the documents.

Among his various serious charges are wire fraud, computer fraud and “obtaining information from a protected computer” plus criminal forfeiture, charges which could place Swartz behind bars for up to 35 years, while slapping him with a $1 million fine.

When not committing random acts of crime Swartz is actually the found of a non-profit organization called Demand Progress which examined public policy and the internet.

Demand Progress has released a statement in which they state that they don’t believe their founder “broke into” MIT facilities, noting:

“As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading said articles is actually felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison.” [Read more…]

Major Social Media Sites Taken Down By Amazon Server Issues

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RedditIn the early hours of Thursday, April 21 various websites including HootSuite, Reddit and Foursquare were offline due to Amazon AWS server issues.

The issue involved Amazon’s cloud computing platform which was experiencing technical difficulties within several major services on the platform.

Sites that did not shut down completely were experiencing major latency issues or brief up and down periods. Also included was question and answer site Formspring.

Most issues occurred because of three Amazon platform issues; Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon Relational Database Service.

All sites affected appear to be working correctly at this time.

 

 

4 Reasons Why Reddit And The Cheezeburger Network Need Each Other

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It’s no secret that Reddit (considered by many to be Digg’s biggest rival) has not not fared well after being acquired by Condé Nast, it’s current parent company.

Between the hack attempts and the lack of corporate support, it’s very clear to the geekverse that Reddit is the red headed step child of Condé Nast (pun not intended) and under its current leadership the site could become extinct through neglect.

However there is a glimmer of hope for the zealous community as Ben Huh of the Cheezeburger Network has offered to take Reddit under his wing (and yes he is serious about the offer).

Hi TDWers, I’m Ben Huh, and I run the Cheezburger Network (which includes The Daily What, if you were too Prop 19’d to notice). I have made this offer privately to a few people associated with Reddit, and I’ll say it publicly now:

I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky troublesome users that we love so much.

Condé, we’ll be waiting for a call.

Cheers,

Ben Huh.

Although a marriage between Reddit and Cheezeburger might sound strange (as Cheezeburger emphasizes images while Reddit is more of a geek community), there are actually 4 reasons why these two odd sites would compliment each other. [Read more…]

Hackers Penetrate Reddit Email And Social Network Accounts

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Reddit Logo

On the Reddit blog today the social web sharing site announced that their [email protected] account had been hacked, adding that the account is used only for feedback e-mail, thus no confidential data was compromised. Reddit is now using [email protected] as their official e-mail for the time being.

Reddit released the following statement via their blog:

“We’re in contact with both google’s and twitter’s security team, and the site has not been broken into. All he’s done at this point is ruined everyone’s night. We don’t recycle passwords, and we don’t store passwords in the reddit email. No one’s account has been compromised. We don’t store any confidential information in that account; it is just for feedback email.”

The part about the team contacting Twitter was added because their official Twitter account was also compromised leading to fake Tweets being added to their account. The fake Tweets have now been removed.

[Read more…]

Is “Deep Linking” in Trouble?

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Linking directly to individual pages on a Web site instead of the home page, also known as “Deep Linking”, is a staple of blogging and the Internet in general. It is used as a means to reference sources, forward interesting articles and, generally, get information out there on the Web.

Without deep linking, social news would likely not exist, many Web 2.0 services (such as Delicious) would have to close and even Google would have to drastically change the way it operates. The Web would, almost overnight, become a much more difficult to use and less efficient place.

However, a recent lawsuit filed by GateHouse media has asked new questions about deep linking and its possible legal implications.

Though the lawsuit is clearly misguided in some ways, including the claim that the site loses advertising over deep linking, it is worth taking a quick moment to look at some of the potential legal hazards that come with deep linking and how to avoid them. [Read more…]

Where I Get Story Ideas

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For most bloggers, finding story ideas is one of the hardest parts of maintaining a blog and it is something that becomes increasingly important important, though much more difficult, the more topical your site is.

Fortunately, the Web provides many great ways to keep on top of what is going on in your field, if you know how to use the tools that are available.

For me, the trick has never been to find the one best way to get new story ideas, but to but open up a wide variety of communication lines. Though my system is not perfect and I continue to miss stories from time to time, I also have a backlog of about three weeks forth of topics in my notebook.

That is because finding story ideas, for most niches, is fairly simple. It is just a matter of knowing where to look. [Read more…]

Reddit Gets a New Look, Still Hates Me

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While my blogs have experienced some community link love, I’ve never been fortunate enough to have the Digg-effect overload my server like a Ritalin kid on crack sugar. I can tell you that one social site that has never sent me an iota of traffic is Reddit. Perhaps their algorithms simply don’t like me – or maybe my content just sucks. I’ll let you decide.

Showing my objective-nature, I will not hold a grudge and will tell you about Reddit’s much-needed, well overdue redesign (the first such change since 2005).

The gang at Mashable have outlined the notable changes:

– The top navigation bar has been re-styled, and now includes a link to the site’s “most controversial” stories (stories with both a lot of up and down votes).

– On the right, you can now customize Reddit based on the topics you want aggregated on your homepage. Just check and un-check the categories you want included/removed.

– Links for creating your own Reddit and submitting a link to the site are much more obvious (also on the right sidebar)

– Story links have been re-styled – it’s not a dramatic change, but it’s easier on the eyes and includes links to comments, saving, hiding, and reporting.

One thing is dramatically clear: Reddit is easier on the eyes. Since I don’t expect the site to suddenly fall in love with my content, I’ll chalk this up to putting some makeup on an average looking woman.

Has anyone out there ever experienced a bump in traffic from Reddit?

Social News Idea Grab Bag

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Here’s a list of ideas I’ve had over the past year or so while using social news sites. Most of them are ideas that I think would improve sites like Digg, Netscape and Reddit in one way or another. Admittedly, one or two of them would just be interesting to see implemented on an experimental level. Either way, feel free to rip each and every one to bits.

[Read more…]