The Weekly Good: A Star Is (Re)Born, The Lester Chambers Story

weekly-good41Your song hits the Billboard Hot 100 Charts at number 11, you and your brothers have played with the likes of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, things are great, you’re on fire. You’ve got it made, right? Wrong. Lester Chambers is living proof that just because you become “popular”, it doesn’t mean that you will be rewarded properly for it.

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Imgur, Now With 1.2B Daily Image Views, Adds New Gallery, Sorting, Reputation Tracking To Its Buzzy Image-Sharing Service

imgurlogoToday, the popular image-sharing platform Imgur is announcing a significant change to its user experience in hopes of increasing the viral potential of its images. In what founder and CEO Alan Schaaf calls “the biggest update” made since launching the site in February 2009, Imgur’s users can now upload their photos directly to the community on Imgur.com via a new icon which will appear in the navigation bar on every page. The full release is scheduled for Monday.

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AMAs, A2As, And The Growth Of Tech-Enabled Political Discourse

ObamaAMAActionEditor’s note: Jon Bischke is a founder of Entelo and is an advisor to several startups. In the interest of full disclosure, the author is a National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O). You can follow Jon on Twitter here

It’s election season again and 2012 is likely to be remembered for many things, one of which is the amount of money spent on political advertising. Indeed, this year’s Presidential Campaign is likely to be the most expensive in history. But amidst the talk of Super PACs and $50,000-a-plate dinners attended by amateur videographers, an interesting and inspiring shift is taking place: The increasing ability of the average citizen to connect directly with candidates through technology.

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New Digg Vs. Reddit Vs. BuzzFeed: Your Mind On Viral Content

funny-pictures-monorail-cat1For three straight days in early August, unintentionally gay porn innuendos of Olympic men’s swimming rained king of traffic on Buzzfeed, the breakout curated newsite of viral content.
Buzzfeeds closest competitors, Reddit and the newly relaunched Digg, each featured dramatically different stories, from the Syrian rebellion to video game history (and, of course, plenty of cats). For 4 days earlier this month, we tracked what netizens would have learned if they visited nothing but the most popular stories of the three websites claiming to be the ultimate source of buzz-worthy Internet content (by taking screenshots of each website simultaneously throughout the week). We fourd a few interesting differences of note:

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TIL Reddit Just Earned A Guinness World Record For RedditGifts

someguy-1345054283Reddit AKA the front page of the internet for cat gifs and atheist rage comics just earned a Guinness World Record for largest online Secret Santa game. Over the last three years, RedditGifts facilitated anonymous gift exchanges between 30,025 participants (including Stephen Colbert) in 115 countries. Only the Reddit team gets the award and they’re not sharing it with all the users although I’m sure if asked, one of the team members would do a IAMA about how their life changed thanks to a piece of paper.

Just like how RedditGifts was started, it was a random Reddit user named someguyfromcanada (pictured) who got the ball rolling with the stat nerds at Guinness.

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Kevin Rose Responds To Reddit AMA: Biggest Digg Regrets, Thoughts On New Digg, More [Video]

kevin-roseLast night, I wrote about Kevin Rose not responding to questions on his AMA on Reddit. Rose was at a birthday party last night but has returned to Reddit today and has posted YouTube responses to five Redditers’ questions.

After all the coverage on Digg’s sale and Rose personally a few weeks ago and now on the launch of new Digg, it’s very interesting to hear Rose’s thoughts. He does a good job going in-depth in his responses, and seems pretty open.

Here are the responses.

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Meet Reddit’s New CEO: Facebook Alum / Quora Star Yishan ‘Sparklepants’ Wong

Screen shot 2012-03-08 at 2.52.08 PMThe front page of the Internet, also known as the social news community Reddit had seen its fair share of ups and downs over the years, but in September of last year, many in its community saw a silver lining when its owner, Conde Nast, spun it out as a standalone site, and recruited co-founder Alexis Ohanian to sit on its new board of directors.

As it so happens, when Reddit became a (somewhat more) independent entity in September, it also launched a search for a CEO to lead the site to infinity and beyond. Today, Reddit is finally announcing the hiring of (what I believe) is its first CEO, Yishan Wong.

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