It seems that in recent times, aquiring cool community driven sites has become the new black. In the latest round of bringing black back into vogue, Wired have stepped up to the plate and have sucessfully struck a deal with Reddit.
For those that aren’t aware, Reddit is a social news site. If you’re asking yourself what that means, its simple; instead of the site owners deciding what is newsworthy – the users of the site submit the news items. To keep the news relevant and fresh, other users can choose to vote a news item up and down in importance. The higher the number of votes a news item receives in a given period, the higher the item will float until it ultimately reaches the #1 story on the site.
Reddit was initially funded through Y!Combinator and to the delight of Paul Graham, it was written in Lisp. Not too long after the site was launched, the owners of the site controversially rewrote Reddit in Python to the horror of the Lisp fanatics. It raised such a noise online, soon other Lisp fanatics were posting articles on how to (re)-write Reddit in 100 lines of Lisp.
The question now is, who is next? Rumors have been flying rampant about Digg.com and it was confirmed that certain parties were interested but that they couldn’t come to a reasonable (read: less than USD$150M) dollar value.
