ReadWriteWeb

Last month, Condé Nast social news site Reddit asked users if they would donate their data for research purposes. This week the site made available a data dump from more than 40,000 people who opted-in to sharing what they do on the site. It's a remarkable move than every social network could learn from.

Reddit's goal for this data is to see it used to create a recommendation engine - in particular a system that would highlight some of the niche communities on Reddit that are a great place to find good topical content, but that too few people on the site have discovered. Now that the data is out in the wild, however, any number of analyses can be performed on it - and no one knows what kinds of observations about the relationship between people, web content, voting and news will be discovered. One little account preference opens up a world of opportunities: "allow my data to be used for research purposes."

While social news site Digg is struggling these days, quieter competitor Reddit is still going strong. Co-founder Steve Huffman, who sold the site for millions to publishing company Conde Nast four years ago this month, now says he wishes he still owned the site.

In an interview yesterday on the podcast Mixergy (which is highly recommended, by the way), Huffman told host Andrew Warner "I wish I still owned Reddit now". He recognizes, though, that the economic climate between now and then may have required the umbrella of Conde Nast in order for Reddit to have thrived. It's an interesting discussion about decisions, history and independence - for once regarding a startup that wasn't suffocated after acquisition.

You could have the greatest idea for a startup in the world. You could even have the best team working together to build a great product. That's all fine and dandy, but for first-time entrepreneurs, if you don't have traction, you're not going anywhere. Traction means having a measurable set of customers or users that serves to prove to a potential investor that your startup is "going places." The tricky part is actually gaining that traction and knowing when you have enough to approach potential investors, so here are a few tips that should help.

Digg's users are still in the middle of their fifth major revolt on the site and the effect of this current uprising is now starting to become more apparent. According to the latest data from Statcounter, referral traffic from Digg to its network hit its lowest point ever on Monday, while traffic from Digg competitor Reddit increased dramatically. Statcounter's CEO Aodhan Cullen notes that "Abandon Digg Day" on Monday turned out to be a "Redd Monday" for Reddit.

Five years ago, Steve Huffman was another young entrepreneurial mind chomping at the bit to launch his very own startup. After taking a train from Virginia to Boston to see Paul Graham speak at Harvard in 2005, Huffman and his partner Alexis Ohanian eventually joined the very first class of Y Combinator. Later that summer, Reddit was born. Now, in 2010, Huffman is taking a stab at his second startup, Hipmunk, and today I had the chance to chat with him about what he has learned from the last five years and why launching his latest project "terrified" him.

Remember that whole thing, where social news and bookmark site Reddit came out asking its users for donations without offering any specific features or much of anything in return? Well, it looks like it's working.

While the Reddit team only offered its "undying gratitude and an optional trophy", it looks like users have gotten some new site functionality and even a potentially more stable site in return for their donations.

Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according to Woopra CEO John Pozadzides, Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures." (emphasis ours)

Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community.

A week ago, social news and bookmark site Reddit sent out a call for help to its users. While some questioned who would just give money to a website for an undefined service in return, more than 6,000 people paid to join Reddit Gold.

Now, the website is saying that "'Experts' misunderestimate our traffic, and we don't know why".

Love Linux? Love your Mac? No you don't - not like the hundreds of people out there with Apple and Tux tattoos. But even then, that's not hard core - it's not like Apple is just a Web 2.0 darling du jour.

Yesterday morning, social news and bookmarking site Reddit announced to its users that they were being drafted. For what, you might ask? The ongoing battle of sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon against that ever-present foe, the spam submission.

Using crowdsourcing to combat spam submissions on an already trained populous that already votes on everything seems like a smart way to outsource an otherwise difficult task.