Also gone: Kourosh Karimkhany, the VP of corporate development for Wired.com's parent company, CondéNet. (The magazine is run separately by Condé Nast, a sister company to CondéNet.) Karimkhany did the deals to buy Reddit, an online news-discussion site; Ars Technica, a rival tech blog; and Webmonkey, a Web-technology how-to site. With no further deals planned, there wasn't much reason to keep him on, we hear. (Photo by Jackson West)

37signals recommends the Hollywood Launch. Release a few hints until the big day, when people flood your site, sent by blog coverage. What happens: They bring the site down. They discover some big bug. You bring the site down for everyone because there was a syntax error. Everyone misunderstood what your product does because your front page wasn't clear enough. They all think it's stupid. The traffic is gone. Hardly any of those users come back.

What you should have done all along: the Gmail Launch. Have users from day one. Give it to your friends and family. Keep improving it based on their feedback. Let them invite their friends. Automate the process, giving everyone some invite codes to share. Codes protect against a premature slashdotting. Iterate. Take off the code requirement. People will come across it and become real users. Then build buzz. Have some kind of news hook. With Reddit, we switched from Lisp to Python. Start marketing.

(Photo by ioerror)

Hansen shows that Wired is reprising all of its mistakes from the last bubble. "Our vision is to not just be a magazine publisher covering technology, but to be a developer of these things," he says. Of a photo-gallery tool for the website, he says: "We’re hoping to have something to show that will blow people’s minds." Has he been eating Wired founder Louis Rossetto's chocolate?

If I sound like a grumpy old fellow who's seen this all before, it's because I have, first-hand. The sports venture isn't the only repetitive pattern I've spotted. In 1996, Wired bought Suck.com, giving the cultural-critique website enough of a budget to hire unskilled 24-year-olds as copy boys. In 2006, Wired bought Reddit, which lets anyone build their own version of Suck.com (except not as good, because none of Reddit's users are as funny as Joey Anuff, Carl Steadman, or Ana Marie Cox).

What's different now? Oh, sure, we can talk about Internet adoption, broadband, open-source software. Whatever. What has really changed is that now, instead of public shareholders funding Wired's wild experiments, advertisers are willing to foot the bill.

And that is perhaps the biggest reason for Hansen's newfound enthusiasm. He's looking forward to putting ads for sugary electrolyte drinks on his new sports blog. Which only makes us think of OK Soda.

When Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto ran the magazine and HotWired in the 1990s — a period, I should disclose, which includes my employment there — he never stopped talking about the company's seemingly limitless future. His pitch, tinged with equal parts Barnum and McLuhan, always boiled down to this: "Get Wired." I chided Hansen for being too low-key about Wired's online successes, and its new ventures, like the TBD HotWired. Rossetto saw no conflict between being a journalist and a marketer. He believed that while Wired reported on the digital revolution, HotWired would live it. He would never have described a product as "TBD." He would have gone with "TBA" instead: to be amazing.

HotWired FAQ

What Is HotWired?
HotWired is new thinking for a new medium. We call it a cyberstation, a suite of vertical content streams about the Digital Revolution and the Second Renaissance with an integrated community space. While HotWired is currently bound by technological limitations that restrict bandwidth, it represents the genetic blueprint that will evolve into the overarching media environment of the next century.

At the core of HotWired's editorial is point of view. We are not in the content business, we are in the context business. People today don't have the time or inclination to make sense of the data flood. HotWired is Wired's answer to the need for professionalism in a new medium that has been filled until now with something that resembles public access television programming.

HotWired is live, twitching, the real-time nervous system of the planet.

What Does HotWired Look Like?
HotWired is a stunning reinterpretation of the World Wide Web. Developed by Creative Director Barbara Kuhr of the award-winning design firm Plunkett + Kuhr, HotWired's look is clean and bright, filled with playful logos by Dutch designer Max Kisman and bursting with world-beat colors.

HotWired can be accessed on the Internet via the World Wide Web and a client application such as Mosaic or NetScape (though be warned, NCSA Mosaic for Windows has a bug which makes it unusable).

How Is HotWired Different?
HotWired doesn't look like any online service out there - it zigs where all the others zag. (HotWired's unofficial design watchword was "war on bevelled edges.") Its content and perspective are as innovative as those of its mothership, Wired magazine, while at the same time being utterly different. Its community space is technologically unrivalled - the first graphical conferencing system for the World Wide Web.

Isn't Advertising Anathema on the Net? The Net community does indeed react negatively to invasive advertising - the kind of spamming conducted recently by the Arizona lawyers Canter and Siegel, which elicited a massive rejection by the Net's immune system. The advertising on HotWired is the opposite of invasive.

Each advertiser is accessible only through a single discreet banner at the head of a content section. Most advertising is 90 percent persuasion and 10 percent information; advertising on HotWired reverses this ratio. And the privacy of members is guaranteed by HotWired's unqualified commitment to never divulge a member's personal information to advertisers.

Why HotWired, Why Now?
Because while Big Media and the telecom behemoths have been busy forming "strategic alliances" to build the "information superhighway" and sending out press releases about the tests they're launching any day now, thousands of companies and millions of people have quietly built a new interactive medium called the Internet.

This medium is not magazines with buttons, any more than television was radio with pictures. It's a new medium with a new aesthetic, a new commercial dynamic.

Many media companies shovel their leftovers into the online world and call it content. HotWired is not one of them.

Where Wired is a clear signpost to the next level, HotWired is operating from that next level. HotWired is a constantly evolving experiment in virtual community. It's Way New Journalism. It's Rational Geographic.

Today is like 1948; a new medium has reached critical mass. We're trying to help define the future of that medium before it ends up like television.

So if you're looking for the soul of our new medium in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get HotWired.

What Does HotWired Cost?
HotWired is free to members. HotWired's revenue model is similar to broadcast media - content supported by sponsors. HotWired's sponsors are some of the bluest chip advertisers in America, including IBM, AT&T, Volvo, Sprint, MCI, Zima (Coors), Internet Shopping Network (Home Shopping Network), Club Med, etc.

What Hotwired Is Not HotWired is not Wired magazine with another name (Wired works perfectly well in print, thank you). It's not a so-called online magazine (print content reduced to ASCII and shoveled into another medium, narrowband interactive). It's not video-on-demand (a pie-in-the-sky marketing concept created by out-of-touch old-media executives to justify their headlong rush into a new medium they don't understand, broadband interactive). It's not an online service like Prodigy or AOL (now rendered obsolete by the explosion of interest in the Internet and the development of the Web and graphical browsers).

And like Wired before it, HotWired is not a cold, marketing concept, but the heartfelt expression of the passion of its creators.

My only regret is that we didn't have this show back when reddit saved Mister Splashy Pants. I'm working on getting some footage of Jim Lehrer saying "Mister Splashy Pants."

Click to expand the image.

1. A pull-down menu replaces the old navigtional bar.
2. There's more space between each submissions
3. Reddit added new momentum arrows to indicate if a story is rising or falling in popularity.
4. Users can now sort by "controversy." "A link can have 0 points but 100 up and 100 down votes," and that, a Reddit engineer told Csutoras, is "something that definitely merits some attention."

As the Reddit "Drankkit" world tour went on, making stops in Silicon Valley and New York , up went the traffic to the site.

The correlation between free beer and traffic is one of those things you always instinctively knew, but never had the proof to back it up. And to think all the time and money wasted on search engine optimization and linkwhoring, when you could just booze up your users. Liquor is quicker.

You'll recall Jakob Lodwick, the always-naked Vimeo founder and geek-lusting girlfriend Julia Allison, Star's professional pretender. Dubbed Jakulia by a notorious Manhattan gossip — Allison herself — the pair were set to make or break Reddit's party with a rumored late-night appearance.

But in the meantime, the booze flowed freely at Hanger bar between Avenues B and C. Here are two of the founders, Huffman and, in the background, Ohanian. Next to Huffman is his fiancé, Katie Babiarz.

While you're admiring the obnoxiously handsome couple, here's a tidbit to bring them back to earth. I learned from Huffman, that, among his college friends, other than a penchant for right-wing conspiracy theories, he's most known for habitually forgetting to flush. Alas, poor Huffman: successful, handsome and engaged to a beautiful woman, but with a circle of friends who can only remember that his shit still stinks.

Here's a better shot of Ohanian. No word on his bathroom habits.

Things got rowdier as the night went on. Well into the sloshing, Ohanian got the bright idea to turn off the music and host an imprompt Q&A session. He got exactly two questions from the packed crowd. One from a woman I'd seen dancing feet away from the founder most of the night.

"How does one start a — when are we going to have intercourse?" she shouted.

"When is Julia Allison getting here?" shouted another. The music returned.

Still, despite the hooch-induced frivolity, you people are still ... you people. Even in Silicon Alley. Solo cups and BlackBerrys? Sick.

But sicker? Your unhealthy obsession with Jakulia, people. All night the whispers were hardly whispers.

"When's Julia Allison coming?"

"What about Jakob Lodwick?"

"Will he be wearing a shirt?"

It went on and on like this all night. But, then, suddenly like a TV dropped in the bathtub, a shock shot through the Hanger bar. You begged, so fine, here they are in all their ... something. Jakulia and a guy.

And then they left.

"He would have been welcome," says Conde Nast's Kourosh Karimkhany of Swartz. "But I don't think he could have come to the bar. He just turned 20." What is it with big media and their unseemly interest in barely-legal entrepreneurs?

Of drinking age — and deserving of a pint — is cofounder Chris Slowe. Dr. Slowe, that is. Besides the one-year anniversary of the acquisition, he's also celebrating his recently awarded Ph.D. Before I get to hear about his thesis, Leah Culver shows up. The Pownce engineer is bubbly as ever, but she has some bad news — she and Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick have broken up. (More on that later.)

The evening is capped off, though, with an appearance by Frank Chu, the famous "12,000 Galaxies" signholder of downtown San Francisco. Now he's up to 725,000 galaxies, whatever that means. On that absurd note, I make my exit. Impressive, perhaps, that Reddit has maintained something of its startup vibe a year after its acquisition. Less impressive that free beer, on Conde Nast's tab, is what it took to spur a big geek turnout.

• The French Embassy is having a soirée at 5:30 at Mighty in Potrero Hill. [Facebook]
• The Wall Street Journal's Don Clark leads the Third Annual Tech Industry Charity Jam at 7 p.m. at the Rickshaw Stop. [Jam Party Invite (pdf)]
• The DNA Lounge, owned by early Netscape employee turned nightclub promoter Jamie Zawinski, hosts Ignite SF, a networking event with presenters ranging from Charles River Ventures VC Susan Wu to San Francisco mayoral candidate Chicken John. [Upcoming]
• Conde Nast's news-aggregator site Reddit is hosting an open bar at the Gallery Lounge from 7-9 p.m. [Reddit Blog]
• We hear that VCs Eric Chin and Mike Jung are throwing an intimate get-together at Fluid, 2 South Park Street in SoMa, to bring together all of the guests from their monthly Alpha dinners in Woodside.

Got a to-do that's a must-do? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com. Check out more events on our Google Calendar:

Swartz was born in 1986. And then he sold a popular social news company for millions of dollars. But he's not an entrepreneur. Swartz helped build the RSS content syndication technology, ran for a seat on the board that oversees Wikipedia, and meanwhile learned a good deal about news, politics, Noam Chomsky, criticism of modern culture, and enough other knowledge to fill a Borders non-fiction section.

Swartz is an academic. He identifies as an activist, author, and "recovering programmer." To see how precocious he is, check his recent interview with blogger Philipp Lenssen. Swartz is white, male, and possibly below drinking age. But he interviews like a seasoned academic. Okay, so the kid's smart. Why does this make him the symbol of a meaningful entrepreneurial archetype? Like other nontrepreneurs, he exhibits these qualities:

Trust in others' information
"I try to read at least a book a week," Swartz told Lenssen. "And I collect longer articles to read on my phone while walking or on buses or things like that." Those little moments that people use to listen to a favorite song on iTunes, Swartz uses to suck up more information. He realizes the vast amount of knowledge that he could make his own, and he does make it his own, quoting thinkers, writers, and politicians and applying their ideas to his experience. Swartz is used to the idea that anything he could say, others have said better. This is a common principle of citation-heavy academic writing, but it's also why Swartz could have the nerve to trust an army of readers to pick the best articles for Reddit, rather than building a top-down system. Of course, it's also why Reddit maintained a higher standard of articles under him and his co-founders than competitors like Digg.

The nontrepreneur learns from the great thinkers and trusts the insights of others.

Distrust in others' information
At the same time, Swartz is a critical thinker who debunks faulty theory such as the idea behind The Secret. He also (if imperfectly) deconstructs the deconstruction of words like "freedom" and "activist."

Swartz is actually worried about a constant feed of information; in his 2006 essay "I hate the news," Swartz argued that an informed citizen has no obligation to keep abreast of minute-by-minute news:

Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?

(Author Tim Ferriss promotes a similar information diet in his book The 4-Hour Workweek.)

To open oneself to a plethora of mostly irrelevant updates is counterproductive. Not only does it allow the frequent input of misinformation, but it also gives one a doubly damaging false sense of knowledge.

Note, of course, the potential irony in Swartz building a news source that seems to encourage users to constantly check for news. Swartz is fully aware.

The nontrepreneur is critical of the common mode of thought.

A holistic approach to the future
By the age of 21, Swartz has heavily affected four significant online entities: RSS, Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Creative Commons alternative to copyright. This ability to make several real differences, though none earth-shattering in itself, comes from the aforementioned building of a vast personal bank of knowledge. It also requires a flow, helped by the distrust for constant distracting updates, which helps one to advance the same themes of thought with several projects, rather than letting each disparate project interfere with the others.

Swartz's life themes seem to be: quality information, public accessibility to that information, and realism in approaching life on every scale. His work with the above four projects follows these themes. He is thus fulfilled by both academic projects — he's not going to make much money from the non-profit Wikipedia and Creative Commons organizations — and businesses. That Reddit made some millions of dollars (one estimate is $10 million split among four founders and some investors) happens to fund his lifestyle, which is one characterized by a lack of spectacle.

Contrast with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose vision for some sense of connection between college students is secondary to his treatment of Facebook as a damn good business. This is a guy who either calculates a frat-boy image (with affectations like wearing flip-flops to speaking events and printing "I'm CEO, bitch" on his business cards) or, well, is a frat-boy, driven by strategy more than ideals. Nothing wrong with this, but it's a more typical and older model of company founder.

The nontrepreneur changes the world a dozen ways at a time; a business is just one.

There are doubtlessly more aspects to the nontrepreneur than these, and room for more exploration and correction of my poor extrapolation. Swartz seems to me to be the consummate nontrepreneur, but others could draw a fuller profile from the examples of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak or Blogger co-creator and Twitter founder Ev Williams. I do hope someone does.

Photo: Jake Appelbaum. Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Prezzish, and Look Shiny. But he'd love to turn this piece into a book.

I have no idea, so I made them up. Hey, if Yahoo does it, so can I.

Wikipedia

1. boba fett death disputed
2. tricia helfer
3. perl vs. python
4. futurama in-jokes
5. africa deletion insignificant

Flickr

1. kitties
2. super-saturated landscape
3. photos with bad blur passed off as "artistic"
4. blogger conference
5. sky
6. sky
7. more damn sky

Facebook

1. hazing law
2. hot girl sociology 201
3. if 100,000 people join this group al gore will run for president
4. up for: "anything i can get"

BangBrothers

1. math homework
2. recipes
3. productivity tips
4. stock market
5. children's games
6. complete works of shakespeare

Digg and Reddit (these were oddly identical)

1. awesome
2. amazing
3. pics
4. video
5. digg vs. reddit
6. wtf is a false dichotomy

Technorati

1. that blogger conference i saw on flickr
2. spaghetti monster places of worship
3. giztoto— engageme— cruncherbot— whatever blog knows when i can get an iphone

Craigslist

1. "free rent"
2. "free rent" -"free sex"
3. drum circle
4. my stolen bike
5. w4m
6. ww4m
7. wwwwww&dog4m

This is an installation of Diggbait, a daily column by Nick Douglas, who also writes for Eat the Press. He likes robots, words, and hospitalized kids (but was only kidding about putting them there).

To his credit, Netscape is still ahead of other social news sites like Reddit — for a couple more months anyway.

Netscape vs. Digg vs. Reddit vs. Wink vs. Newsvine [Alexa]

I ordered a meal, but couldn't make myself eat it. The food just sort of seemed to stick in my mouth, each swallow painful.

"So what are you going to buy first?" someone asked each of us. When it came to me, I stared blankly. I couldn't think of anything I wanted.

"Who's going to pay for the check?" Steve asked. "Oh, wait. I just realized, for the first time, that it's irrelevant."

The Afterparty [Raw Thought; picture from Reddit]

• Reflecting on an interview with TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington, a Reddit co-founder says the site "isn't serious" — and no one inside the tech bubble understands that. [Raw Thought]
• Why Windows shows you annoying, unnecessary popups: "Not many people have gotten a raise and a promotion for stopping features from shipping." [MSDN blogs]
• Elevator-pitch presentations? Yawn. Elevator-pitch contests? Now there's a chance to make someone cry. And we all love to see a startupper cry. [PR Leap]
• Kazaa, the disappointing successor to Napster, agreed to pay $10 million to music companies in a settlement over accusations of copyright infringement. [NY Times]
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing blog 10 Zen Monkeys in a lawsuit against Michael Crook, who tried to coerce the blog into taking down the photo (Crook on right) you see here. The whole thing started because Crook griefed some sexually adventurous Craigslist users and published their personal information, and 10 Zen Monkeys railed against his actions. What a whiny emo kid. [10 Zen Monkeys]

• Behind the deal, volume VI: Billionaire Mark Cuban shares some hearsay about Google's purchase of YouTube. For instance, a whole $500 million of YouTube's $1.65 billion windfall allegedly went in escrow to potentially pay for copyright lawsuits, and Google organized a legal squeeze on YouTube's competitors while the video site cut deals with music and movie companies. [Blog Maverick]
• Know how wiki site SocialText congratulated competitor JotSpot for selling itself to Google? Now SocialText is handing out free services to user migrating from JotSpot. SocialText founder Ross Mayfield may look like a pretty boy, but he plays dirty. [SocialText]
• Today in "I can't believe they're serious": The startup "Hobeez" — a social site based on hobbies, not hobos — couldn't look worse if it was built by a blind first-grader during recess. Its logo was designed with the satirical Web 2.0 Logo Creator. And yet its founders are e-mailing pitches to bloggers. [Hobeez]

The Wired News director who will oversee Reddit now that it's owned by Wired parent Condé Nast, already explained Wired's plan for the social bookmark site to Valleywag. Now Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian offers Reddit's take on the news coverage and the site's future.

I asked Reddit's founders how they felt about coverage on the tech blog TechCrunch, who compared Reddit to Digg (a more popular social news site), and where the company expects to go. Below is Alexis's reply, devoid of a Digg mention.

As far as I know, this was the first time we graced the pages of TechCrunch, so we're just happy for the coverage. In fact, I think Michael made some very good points about reddit's fast load time and high content-to-ad ratio. I do wish he'd mentioned our mascot, but oh well.

The team has been pretty much solidified ever since we got personalized mugs, so I believe any expansion in the near future would involve continuing to build out reddit as well as integrate technology with some existing [Condé Nast] web properties, like Style.com and Epicurious.com. We'd also like to continue building new sites — like lipstick.com — both for CN and outside clients.

Oh, and btw, we totally pwn3d [Wired's] Kourosh in Soul Caliber.

Earlier: Behind the deal, volume III: Wired buys Reddit [Valleywag]

As TechCrunch reported and Reddit announced this morning, Condé Nast bought social bookmarking site Reddit. I talked to Wired Digital general manager Kourosh Karimkhany, who will directly oversee Reddit as a Wired property.

Condé Nast first experimented with Reddit by collaborating on a small project, lipstick.com. It's a gossip site built on the same voting and bookmarking system used on Reddit. (The site is still "doing well," says Kourosh, who's not sure what will happen to it now.)

"They were a little bit skeptical of us," says Kourosh of Reddit's four-man team. "But we liked what they were doing," and Condé Nast was "pleasantly surprised" with the outcome.

The two companies started talking seriously this summer, he says. "I went to their Boston pad, we played some video games." And this month they wrapped up the buyout.

Wired Digital plans to expand Reddit, continuing the flagship Reddit.com site while "blowing out new products." He cites one deal with the Washington Post and its Slate site, made before Wired bought Reddit. Condé Nast also wants to integrate Reddit with some of its own titles.

"We want to distribute the Reddit technology widely throughout the net," says Kourosh — meaning Wired wants buyers to license the Reddit system. The company wants Reddit to "just focus on building out," which may involve adding to the current staff of four (all co-founders), who will all move from Boston to San Francisco and work at Wired's office.

Kourosh dodged one question — when I asked (twice) whether Wired had considered the more popular social news site Digg, he would only say, "Reddit was the right choice. We liked Reddit's open attitude. Came down to that."

Sounds like something went on — one could speculate that Wired got turned off by Digg's price or realized founder Kevin Rose wouldn't budge from his own plans for his site (which apparently don't include third-party licensing like Reddit's). When I asked Rose if Condé Nast had approached Digg, he declined to comment, saying his company doesn't respond to rumors.

• Om Malik hires Red Herring writer Liz Gannes (pictured) to write for his tech blog, GigaOM. The move means Liz will finally get a byline. [Weblogs Work, photo by Brian Oberkirch]
• The makers of social news site Reddit give an interview, in which they reveal they own the domain breadpig.com. [Juxtaviews]
• The Weblogs, Inc. music blog thoroughly explains filesharing lawsuits (for anyone who needs a refresher). Takeaway: the RIAA is sketchy as hell. [Digital Music Weblog]
• And in podcast news, the latest episode of This Week in Tech starts with Digg founder Kevin Rose explaining that he's not a multi-millionaire, not even a "thousand-aire," and that he can't afford a couch. [TWiT]