Three years ago, Conde Nast bought out Reddit. Reddit is a website where a community of users vote on the most interesting stories. The most interesting recent stories land on the Reddit homepage and receive a large number of visits. Conde Nast has been taking a hit lately as its been discovered that they may lose $1 billion in ad revenue this year.

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian both founded Reddit after launching it from Y-Combinator. Christopher Rowe and Aaron Swartz joined the team shortly after the company was founded. Y-Combinator is an incubation firm started by Paul Graham. Both of the Reddit founders are leaving for personal reasons.

Huffman is moving back to Virginia to spend more time with his wife. Ohanian plans to spend some time traveling. Rowe will be staying with Reddit for a while. Swartz was fired from Reddit two years ago for not respecting the company rules after being acquired by Wired Magazine.

Reddit, the social bookmarking website that was acquired by Condé Nast in November 2006  has opened up their source code.  The source code is available at http://code.reddit.com. 

The success of Digg and Reddit have inspired many companies to start their own social bookmarking sites.  Netscape started and closed down Propeller and Mixx has risen as a favorite.   Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo! and StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay.  MySpace, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Live also have social bookmarking features.  Digg still remains as Reddit’s biggest competitor.  Going open source is one way that Reddit has one-upped Digg.

Ever since Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast, the company’s monthly uniques has grown by 4.4 million and page views have grown by 120 million according to co-founder Steve Huffman.  Reddit will be launching a new design and a partnership with PBS shortly.

Reddit is a product of Y-Combinator.

The digital entity of Wired Magazine, Wired.com has acquired Ars Technica.  Ars Technica is a technology blog that was started in 1998 by Ken “Caesar” Fisher.  Ars Technica has 3 operating revenue sources: affiliate sales commissions, advertising through Federated Media, user subscription fees, and sales of Ars brand merchandise.

Ars Technica focuses on topics such as Technology and Culture, CPU Theory & Praxis, Hardware, Infinite Loop (about Apple), One Microsoft Way (about Microsoft), Open Ended (open source software), Kit (hardware), Nobel Intent (science), and Opposable Thumbs (video games).

The financial details were undisclosed, but TechCrunch speculates that the amount was around the range of $25 million in cash.  Ars Technica receives about 1.5 million monthly unique visitors and 4 million page views. 

CondéNet will take over the advertising sales for Ars Technica.  Ars Technica will be rolled into Wired.

Can billions of dollars buy you confidence or the ability to communicate your points intellectually when you want to?  Nope.  What about if you are the President of the U.S.?  Nope.

In the 2004 election, President Bush used the word, ‘Internets:’

DANIEL FARLEY, AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr. President, since we continue to police the world, how do you intend to maintain our military presence without reinstituting a draft?
BUSH: Yes, that’s a great question. Thanks. I hear there’s rumors on the, uh, Internets [pause] that we’re going to have a draft. We’re not going to have a draft, period. The all-volunteer army works. It works particularly when we pay our troops well. It works when we make sure they’ve got housing, like we have done in the last military budgets.

We all slip sometimes when being interviewed.  Myself included.  An example I remember is when standing in recruitment lines at Michigan State University career fairs.  There was one time I asked a recruiter at Rolls-Royce the type of opportunities that Boeing has to offer.  I’m pretty sure that eliminated the chance of being recruited at Rolls-Royce that day.  I laughed about it later that night over a few beers.  What was I thinking?

“What was I thinking” might be what the CEO of Google pondered after his interview with Condé Nast Portfolio.  Russ Mitchell, a senior writer at Portfolio asked Schmidt, “Why does a merged Microsoft-Yahoo pose such a threat to Google?”

Earlier this year, Microsoft made an offer to acquire Yahoo! for $44.1 billion.  This acquisition would put the world’s biggest software company in a joint effort with the most trafficked search engine company to take on Google.  The thought of this possibility should worry the CEO of Google, possibly make him nervous.  Judging by the response to the answer provided below, it clearly has made him nervous.

“It’s an unstable situation. But the theoretical issue is the concentration of Microsoft’s resources and its history, combined with the very large share that it would have in certain applications—like instant messaging and email—that could be used essentially to break the internet and diminish choice,” stated Eric Schmidt in the interview.

Oof.  “Break the Internet?”  Seriously?  I place this statement to be in the hall of shame along with “Don’t tase me, bro” and “rumors on the Internets.”