My how time flies. Today marks the 1 year anniversary since the Daily Dot posted our very first news story. 

It wasn't anything fancy at the time, just a story posted to the personal blog of editor/developer Grant Robertson. It covered controversy between reddit and CNN a promotional video showing Sikh members superimposed with Osama Bin Laden. I wasn't there a year ago (I've only been with the company since August) but it's pretty obvious that we have grown quite a bit since that first post.  

Yes, every community has it's epic, life-changing events where like-minded souls can celebrate their passions. For the online community this is ROFLcon! Two days of real life memes and every internet famous person you can think of all converge every two years on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, MA to celebrate the best of Web culture. 

Of course we wouldn't miss this for the world so we will be there covering all of the panels, interviews, and parties. Look for a slew of stories all this week and then follow up coverage over the course of the weekend. 

In fact, we are so excited for ROFLcon that we are sponsoring the official pre-party on Thursday, May 3! If you are in the Boston area on Thursday night come by Asgard Pub in Cambridge and have a couple of drinks on us! We'll be there starting at 8:00 p.m. until they kick us out. I would love to see your beautiful faces.

Until then, get a little taste of what to expect at ROFLcon from our friends at PopSpot.

See you in Boston!

The rumors are true. Owen Thomas and the Daily Dot have parted ways.

We will miss him. He was our founding editor and was a big part of the team that has taken the Dot from 0-60, beating our traffic goals month after month. Together, we established our voice, defined our mission, recruited an incredible team, and pioneered a new kind of community journalism.

Owen is a tireless editor -- look no further than our 16-page SXSW print edition, produced in a 36-hour forced march to glory in Austin. He was a huge asset to a startup like ours, from day one. He was, as I have said, a Viking on the longship.

I’m proud of what we accomplished together, and I know that Owen is as well. I am thankful for his time with us—I will miss the long talks about the nature and future of journalism online and off. It has been an inspiring ride together. Owen is passionate and driven, a true believer. I think we taught each other a few things along the way, too.

It is a bittersweet parting. Bitter, because he is leaving us. Sweet, because Owen has some awesome opportunities in front of him. We will be cheering him on from the proverbial sidelines. Owen will always be a valued member of the Daily Dot alumni network.

In the interim, if you will miss your daily dose of Owen, take solace in Ditherati, Owen’s personal media venture on the Web since 1997.

For our part at the Dot, from Owen and the team he built and led, to our tech and data crew to our growing operations staff and marketing department, we have laid a foundation for the long term. We’re all feeling bullish. The earliest days, when we had nothing but a hacked-together site and a few big ideas? That was cool. But to me, it’s more exciting to think about what we can become now that we’ve established a brand and an ethos. What you see right now is just the tip of the iceberg.

A fish swims to breathe -- change is constant, and good. Change is part of the excitement and the adventure of a media startup. Thank you, Owen, for sharing the journey thus far. We look forward to seeing what you’ll do next. :)

I’m very pleased to announce that Zach Richardson, co-founder of Ravel (which was acquired today by W2O Group) has joined us at the Daily Dot as CTO.

We first met the good folk at Ravel as one of their biggest customers. We brought them on to assist with our big data work and leaderboards development almost a year ago. When we found out that Ravel was getting acquired and that Zach wanted to work on another startup, we jumped at the opportunity. Welcome, Zach. We’re really happy to have you among our ranks, and we’re going to do great things together.

For those familiar with Zach’s work, he’ll still be actively contributing to and developing GoldenOrb and Armstrong CMS as part of our technological mission, and at a corporate level we’re committed to sponsoring and stewarding both of those projects. GoldenOrb is an open source version of Google’s Pregel that Ravel originally developed, and Armstrong is a Knight-funded CMS for modern newsrooms.

Zach’s addition represents the next step in the core evolution of our strategy, which is equally about technology as great editorial content.

The Daily Dot is the hometown newspaper of the World Wide Web. Why are we a"newspaper" rather than "just a blog"? A newspaper is about more than the paper it's printed on. It represents a distinct approach to serving a community. Among the distinctions of a newspaper are the breadth and depth it offers. Newspapers cover more news (and vastly more original news). And they cover each story with greater depth and frequency than any other news format. Broadcast news bothers with just a small subset of what newspapers report. Magazines tackle a small number of stories with more in-depth reporting (which I sadly never get around to reading).

Newspapers have always been about narrowcasting—no one reads an entire newspaper. They read the surprising bits—which they can’t get anywhere else. We read what’s relevant to ourselves, and we hope to get a few happy accidents on the way. With a truly great newspaper, you get an equally unique level of depth and insight in those subjects, too.

What am I getting at?

Newspapers, despite their many virtues, have always been limited by technology, by paper. Our luxury and opportunity is that the web can do what paper never could.

Now that Zach is leading the development team, the Daily Dot is now in position to take full advantage of the opportunity. The Daily Dot is going to be a technology company just as much as it is a content company. As a brilliant big-data engineer, Zach is uniquely suited to tackle the many problems that remain unsolved in the media industry.

Providing our readers with breadth and depth, with relevance, with insight and understanding is as much about our engineering as our reporting and writing. It’s about the user interaction design and performance of any Daily Dot-branded experience, of course. But it’s just as much about the personalization and adaptive learning technologies that are going to bring each reader the information he or she cares about most and crafts it to their needs.

We’re also strategically committed to continuing to gather deep knowledge of  online communities, knowledge that our data work uniquely reveals—in other words, technology can itself be content.

The Daily Dot experience has to to be a joy in every way, and I am very pleased at the progress we've made so far in that direction. In 2012 we are "doubling down” in every department.

One more thing -- we didn't get into this business just to revolutionize media for readers.

Existing media is even more broken for advertisers. A 19th century editor once said that if you take away all the articles in the newspaper, and just leave the ads, you'd actually have a remarkably comprehensive picture of what is happening in a community—its hopes and dreams, and struggles and trials. That's just to say, advertising is not a sideline. It’s not a “necessary evil.” It's part and parcel of what we do, and if it's an annoying distraction online right now, that's because we, as an industry, have done a bad job of it. And most of the stuff that's going to transform advertising into a valuable reading experience, is technological. Delivering an incredible advertising product is something Zach enables, too.

Zach is an extraordinary technologist. His hiring reflects our commitment to being a ground-breaking technology company, not merely a technology enabled company. With his addition, we look forward to building the kind of services and experiences that people in the 21st century should expect from media companies.

We’ll get to flying cars and jetpacks next year.

Edit: So yeah, Just kidding. April Fools! 

Love,

The Daily Dot

In the course of covering the great communities of the Internet, we feel like we've learned a thing or two about what makes a great social site. That is why we are excited to announce our newest venture, CorkMarket 

Think of Pinterest but better! Why is CorkMarket better? Because CorkMarket does more! Tack your interests on your corkboard, and you'll seamlessly share to all of your online social homes with a simple click. Connect to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Flickr, Etsy, Pinterest, Canv.as, and pretty much anywhere you can imagine. The best part is that CorkMarket will be totally open and free to everyone—no invite needed!

Tack something awesome to your board and your friends and followers will tack your interest to their board. Build up enough retacks from your followers and you'll be able to redeem those tacks from any one of our retail partners to receive the awesome thing that you originally tacked! How cool is that?

If you want to stay up to date with the latest news, just import a social feed of your choice or connect directly to the Daily Dot and create your own custom corkboard newsroom with full multimedia capability.

For those that want to tack on the go we've got iPhone and iPad apps awaiting approval from Apple, and you'll be seeing an Android app in the market by the end of the month.

We've got a few more tricks up our sleeve, but this should give you a taste of what's to come once we officially launch. Until then sign up for early access either at dailydot.com or corkmarket.co, and we will send you and email as soon as we open our doors.

Last week thousands of people flocked to Austin, TX for five days of innovation, ideas, technology, design and of course lots of drinking with some tacos thrown in for good measure. Well, my head is still a little fuzzy but I think we survived South by Southwest Interactive unscathed and stronger than ever. Here is what I can piece together from my memory and the wristbands I had after the dust settled.

The Internet finally comes to print!

In true Daily Dot style we had a few shenanigans of our own. We printed up 10,000 copies of a full 16 page SXSW commemorative color print edition of the Daily Dot, then we built a time machine and went back in time to kidnap a pair of authentic newsies from 1930 to distribute them for us. They were scared at first but after explaining to them what the internet was and why it was on a newspaper they got into the swing of things and did what they did best (although we did have to bail one out of jail after getting into a fight at the Pure Volume House). By the end of the week we managed to get almost all of the papers into people's happy hands. We also discovered that a newspaper has the added value of being a makeshift umbrella when the rain starts pouring down, let's see your online internet do that! Even Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and print edition cover boy, got his hands on a copy to show off in front of his adoring fans.

I held on to a few copies of the print edition for sentimental reasons so if you weren't able to get one and want a copy just shoot me an e-mail (logan(at)dailydot.com) and I'll hook you up. If you just want to read the stories we wrote then check out this link for the rundown on all of our coverage.

Yay! People are giving us attention!

We did manage to get a little love from the from our media compatriots at places like MSNBC.com, ReadWriteWeb, and AllThingsD among others. Nick and Owen spent a good portion of the week talking to different outlets and occasionally posing for the camera.

It is always awesome to see other media pay attention to what we do and it seems like they are really starting to understand what we are all about as opposed to when we launched and there was a lot of confusion surrounding what our actual goals were. I think they are finally starting to get it.

Hey Party People!

Sure SXSW has panels and a tradeshow and all of that crap, but the real work gets done by networking and building the relationships that we made online. This is why meet ups and parties are so central to the whole SXSW experience. 

I was lucky enough to be asked by SXSW to host a meet up for users of Reddit. It was so amazing to get a chance to hang out with so many redditors from all over the country including reddit staffers and the founders of RedditGifts! Just seeing how easily everyone was able to get along and start conversations right away really brought home the idea that these people really are a community even if they have never met before.

Later that night we held a company dinner and invited out business partners, friends, enemies (you know who you are), community leaders and basically any awesome person we could find. If I could bottle the energy and excitement that came out of that dining room I could power the city of Austin for a month.

Of course there were more like the Awesomeist Journalism Party with Hacks/Hackers or the Tumblr meet up with Topherchris or that one thing.... ugh, it's getting all fuzzy again and you don't want me to ramble on about how much fun we had so I'll spare you.

So what's up with the Daily Dot now?

Ok, so we rocked SXSW but how is the Daily Dot really doing? Glad you asked.

2012 has been very good to us, our numbers are growing steadily from month to month with no real indication of stopping. Since Jan. 1, 2012 we have had 850,000 unique visitors to our site and just under 1.5 million pageviews! On top of that we just broke 400,000 unique visitors for the past 30 days which breaks our all time record and more than triples our monthly traffic since we launched back in August. I'd say that's not too shabby for a bunch of journalists and rapscallions who just wanted to cover the communities that we live in. 

We've been getting linked to more and more by higher-profile sites like Mashable, The Huffington Post, Yahoo, and MSN. People are starting to view us as the authority on our communities such as when NPR's On The Media asked Fruzsina to talk about the YouTube reply girls phenomenon. 

Over all it is a very exciting time at the Daily Dot and I cannot wait for you to see what we've got coming in the next few months. As always stay tuned here for the latest on what we're up to.

Now I'm gonna go sleep for a week.

Logan Youree, Community Manager

Journalism is a competitive endeavor but ultimately the most important thing is spreading information and getting your content in front of as many eyes as possible. Today we are proud to say that we have taken a huge step in that direction by partnering with Mashable to syndicate our content on their site.

What this means is that some of our select stories will appear on Mashable.com with a small notation and a link to the story on our site. Since Mashable has such a huge following it means that we will be getting our content in front of readers who may not have ever heard of the Daily Dot. I also like to think that it adds a little of that Daily Dot flavor to Mashable (tastes like sriracha!).

Check out the post on Mashable for a few more details and to see their other new content partners.

When it comes down to it we are really just a bunch of sappy people who love the communities that we cover. So on this day of love or made up excuse to sell cards and candy (however you see it) would you please be our Valentine?

<3

When we launched our little news site back in August we decided to have make a fun homage to our roots and make full commemorative print editions of the Daily Dot to hand out to our fledgling readership. Some of you thought it was cute, some of you thought it was a cool idea, others of you were confused and thought that we were actually printing a regular newspaper covering the Internet. Well, that isn't exactly what we do but I think most of you have figured that out by now.

Less than a month from now the South by Southwest Interactive Festival will be hitting the city of Austin, TX like a ton of LEGO® blocks bringing in thousands of biggest and brightest stars of the online community. Since many of the Daily Dot staff live in Austin we figured that this would be another great chance blacken your fingers and give you paper cuts with another round of commemorative prints!

From March 10-13 we will be hitting the street handing out copies all around downtown Austin and anywhere that the conference attendees will be congregating in the meat-space. We will have special SXSW related stories and reporters in the field to find out what online communities do when they gather in the real world.

Of course it wouldn't be a true newspaper without ads. So if your company is hosting a party or if you have an awesome product that you want people to see then shoot us a quick message at ads@dailydot.com.

We'll see you in Austin!

Yeah, I know, New Year's resolutions are cliche and lame and pretty much just a bunch of lies that we tell ourselves to give ourselves hope for the upcoming year. But since this is the first New Year in the brief existence of the Dot we wanted to set a bar for ourselves. Like most resolutions we probably won't hit all of these and we will acheive goals that we didn't even anticipate but I can promise that we will have a ton of fun along the way and I hope you will be there to share it with us. I polled the rest of the team and this is what we said.

 Kevin Morris, Staff Writer, GIFer - Get r/dailydot up to 10,000 subscribers. Only 9,944 away!