Reddit, Digg and the dark secrets of the Hashemites

Reddit.com, is a fascinating online news aggregator that started a year ago with $12,000 in seed funding.http://reddit.com

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian both University of Virginia graduates kicked off June 2005 with the help of the Y Combinator venture firm in Cambridge, they were joined by Christopher Slowe this January. An Angel investor who wants to remain anonymous funded the site through August, and have already statred revenue egneration through advertsising and licensing fees. They have three full-time workers and a part-time graduate student in a three-bedroom apartment in Davis Square, Somerville. Mass. They hit a profit in April but won't disclose revenues but claim 50,000 hits per day.

In late Febrauary they were joined by boy genius Aaron Swartz from Stanford U. as part of the company's merger with Swartz's Infogami which was also under the U Combinator umbrella. The two companies are known as not a bug.(?)

Y Combinator partner Paul Graham said Reddit's users circumvent the traditional news model, choosing the most interesting news stories of the day. "It lets the wisdom of crowds do what editors used to do."

On Reddit.com users select and rank the news stories it posts,by means of a points scoring scheme,to calculate position of the story on the Front Page. All this user activity means that it now ranks 1,865 of the most visited sites on the web by Alexa.com.

Sub-Reddits allow the users to focus on user defineable areas.

PC World magazine said Reddit had the edge over aggregator Digg.com, highlighting the user comments and the site's ability to make recommendations to users based on past story selections.They said .."Reddit may represent the future of community news filters."

Digg.com, based over on the West Coast is said to rank 166th on the web out of the 18 million known sites. They have 15 employees and $2.8 million in venture capital. By comparison, Reddit is operated by three full-time workers and a part-time graduate student in a three-bedroom apartment in Davis Square.

Have a look at it Reddit , and also their Blogger Blog.

Here is a fascinating article brought to my attention by Reddit ...

"As the Arabs see the Jews" His Majesty King Abdullah, The American Magazine November, 1947

An essay, written by King Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah, which appeared in the United States six months before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In the article, King Abdullah disputes the mistaken view that Arab opposition to Zionism (and later the state of Israel) is because of longstanding religious or ethnic hatred.

King Hussein as a young boy,in 1951, saw King Abdullah murdered in front of him in Jerusaem, and was slightly injured as a result. Abdullah like all the Hashemites was vertically challenged and was known in the Foreign Office as "Bevan's little King" he plotted with the Jewish Agency and Golda Meir to prevent the formation of a separate Palestinian state and in his quest for territorial and political aggrandizement to seize the West Bank. (Pic King H at time of '67 war)

Abdullah was killed by a Palestinian (what would be called today a terrorist) who was encouraged by the Mufti of Jerusalem who rumbled Abdullah's sell out of the Palestinian Arabs to the Zionists - some say money changed hands - which in a sense had a part to play in Nasser's Arab revolt and the British / French / Israeli collusion in a plot to remove Nasser.

The Arab, and especially Palestinian distrust of the UK and the Foreign office has deep roots and just cause.