TechCruch breaks the news: Reddit has been acquired by Condé Nast. Reddit is a community-driven news and what’s-cool site—something like Digg, but better. (For starters, Reddit hasn’t hyped up an untrue story about one of LibraryThing’s competitors!) I’ve followed them for some time, ever since meeting the founders at a Paul Graham/Y Combinator event in Cambridge. I’m pleased good things happen to good people.*

UPDATE: See this blog post. They’re still rich, but it appears they’re going to be tortured with office nonsense until their get-out-of-jail date.

Apparently Reddit had a prior relationship with Conde Nast, making Lipstick.com, Reddit for celebrity news. It doesn’t have a lot of users yet, so I’m thinking a few hundred Thingamabrarians could get together and vote up our celebrity story—appearing in OK Magazine on the same page as Lindsay Lohan. Ready? Set? Go!

*I’m also impressed by their blog entry on the role of users in Reddit’s success (“we’re not kidding ourselves: you all have made it everything that it is”). Much more gracious than YouTube, IMHO.

The Librarians who LibraryThing group now has 1,000 members. I ask you, can 1,000 librarians be wrong?

Not to bring up an example, but an alert LibraryThinger wrote us about some rumors circulating about LibraryThing, and given out at one of the many recent library conferences. Here are the rumors, and the truth behind them:

1. LibraryThing was started by Simmons graduate students. False. LibraryThing was started by me, Tim Spalding, and I don’t have an MLS. Some months later, Abby, who has an MLS from Simmons, joined as LibraryThing’s first employee.*
2. LibraryThing is staffed purely by librarians. False. Of three employees (me, Abby and Chris), Abby is the only librarian.
3. LibraryThing gets its MARC records from OCLC. False. LibraryThing has expressed interest in working with OCLC, but we do not currently do so. LibraryThing gets its records directly from libraries’ who make their records available through Z39.50 connections. We connect to about 60 libraries and library consortia. The most commonly used of these is the Library of Congress.
4. Abby and Tim know all the words to Hips Don’t Lie. No comment.

*The second employee was supposed to be a Simmons grad, but it fell through. We’ve found it very hard to hire library tech people. The best ones may not be paid what they’re worth, but convincing someone to leave a secure, 40-hour, sometimes unionized job at a library for a small startup that won’t pay you more, but where you are expected to work 80 hours per week, with no promise your job will be around in a year… well, it’s hard.