It's proving to be an exciting summer for the site, and, in a sign of our ongoing progress, we're excited to )retroactively( announce two new members of team reddit. Starting earlier this month, we've had an intern working out of our New York office. Her name is Alex )a.k.a. cupcake1713 (, and she's a junior at Wesleyan University double majoring in Japanese and Science in Society. Like our much-overworked and awesome community manager Erik ,

It's long overdue, but we're going to start thanking our valued sponsors on the blog. We'd love to link to everyone that bought a sponsored headline but we're getting around 200 different advertisers a week, so that'd get a bit unwieldy. We'll be highlighting the 20 highest scoring sponsored headlines each week, along with some of our other advertisers and partners. This is the first time we're doing this,

There's been some recent speculation about what it looks like when the reddit admins get together, and we wanted to set the record straight: On an unrelated note, there have been some dirty rumors that we've been spending all our time playing ping pong instead of working on the site. They are completely unfounded.

Yesterday Wired magazine released their brand new iPad app . It's the same price per issue as the print edition )$4.99( and comes with a bunch of slick features . Now, normally we don't pimp out products from our sister site, but we made an exception for this one because we honestly think it's a breakthrough. Also they gave us brownies. But still, we really do think it represents the future of magazines. Read through the list of features or watch the video to see what we mean.

After our call to open source developers on Monday and the addition of our code repository to github , we've been ecstatic to see a flurry of activity in #reddit-dev on freenode as well as on our mailing list. We'd like to announce that our most recent accepted patch is from the gentlemen at a YCombinator start-up called embed.ly who, as you might have guessed, specialize in providing embeddable media using the open oEmbed standard. When a link gets submitted to reddit,

You may remember the problems that we've been having with our persistent cache, memcacheDB . Our initial response was to add a bunch more RAM to the system, which would probably only last us a few weeks, until we could put a better solution in place. Fortunately with EC2 we were able to spin up five new machines with gobs of RAM to fill that temporary role. After that, we dedicated 33% of our development team )i.e.

When we added the ability to mark messages as unread last month, one of the maintenance problems that became apparent was a need to be able to find those unread messages once they fell off the first page, never to be seen again. So, we added an unread tab to the inbox page. Priming that listing required a little bit of db churn )enough to postpone this announcement for a couple of days actually(, and we think we got everyone, but let us know if your unread tab looks sub-par.

Welcome back to work, everyone. Now that last year is officially behind us, it's time to honor the best of 2009. That's right, we're kicking off the second annual "best of reddit" awards. To nominate someone or something, click the name of the category and post a top-level comment: Comment of the Year Commenter of the Year Submission of the Year Submitter of the Year Community of the Year Got it? Nominations go on the official threads linked above.

United States House Representative for Ohio's 10th congressional district Dennis Kucinich shared some of his busy schedule to answer your top 10 questions . Congressman Kucinich also has an important question for the reddit community at the end of the interview. Watch the full 28min interview in HD here or on youtube . Below the embedded video are all the questions, where you can also go directly to the Congressman's responses for each question.

After having our new sponsored link program in beta for the last 3 weeks, we're happy to announce that we've worked the bugs out )famous last words( and are opening it up to all users. To get started, simply click on the new "self-serve advertising" link in the footer on the front page, or, for the lazy, go here . All you need to get started is $20, a credit card * , and some time to skim our ToS )which can be summed up with: be nice, don't be sneaky,

We'll no longer be showing the "edited" star for comments edited in the first minute of their lifetime, as long as they don't garner any votes in that time. That means that you can quickly fix your typos without worrying about incurring the Edited Star of Doom)tm(. There's a Death Star joke in there somewhere.

Congressman Barney Frank answers your top ten questions . Watch the videos below or on YouTube HERE : Thank you to Congressman Frank for taking time out of an extremely busy schedule to answer these questions in great detail. If you don't have time to watch the full 40 min interview , do yourself a favor and watch Barney Frank's thought provoking answer to question #10 : Congressman Frank, earlier this week you remarked that the National Equality March in Washington D.C. was,

After a brief* hiatus, the daily reddit awards have returned ! Once a day, at the stroke of midnight )reddit standard time(, we'll scour the previous 24 hours' worth of activity and post the list of honorees here . Long-time redditors will remember we once had a simple leaderboard showing the highest-karma users. The site's grown a lot since then, and we wanted a new system that shows our appreciation of all good users, even the relative n00bs.

Ask Barney Frank anything. Ask questions HERE . United States House Representative for Massachusetts's 4th congressional district Barney Frank will be sharing some of his very busy schedule to answer your top 10 questions. Democrat Barney Frank has been in the House Of Representatives since 1982, serves as the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee , and is " widely considered to be one of the most powerful members of Congress ".

Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe answers your top ten questions : )you can also find the video playlist HERE (. To say that Mike went above and beyond in answering these questions would be an understatement. Oodles of fun anecdotes, commentary, and yes opera singin'. Also, his answer to " Is there any chance you'll stop having sex with my wife in her dreams? It's getting pretty old, Mike " is so elegant, it would have made Archimedes jealous.

Guest blogging by reddit's Fantastic Voyagers. Follow their journey on their reddit . Subscribe today! Hey guys and gals, it's Draynen from Reddit's Fantastic Voyage . Well, sort of anyway. While we were in Tampa, Jake and I stopped by Soapier, makers of the Reddit Alien soap and got a crash course in soap making. It might not seem like it just from looking at the bars themselves, but each Reddit soap is painstakingly hand crafted before heading out the door. It's not easy.

You may have heard that Stephen Colbert gave reddit a shoutout last week during his segment introducing Movits! )who rock, btw( a Swedish swing-hip-hop-jazz band he discovered on our site. Needless to say )and as I'm sure my neighbors can attest( we got a little excited. And yes, though it wasn't a direct Colbert Bump - more of a Colbert Nudge - we did see a nice little spike the following day. Movits!

Submit and vote on questions here. Our relationship with TED started not long after their famous talks began appearing on our front page; the talks were so well liked that we made them a featured channel on reddit.TV . And one of their most viewed talks was delivered by Sir Ken Robinson, whom reddit has the privilege of interviewing with our friends at TED. Sir Ken is a creativity expert. He challenges the way we're educating our children,

Advertising is one way we keep reddit running and free )well, merch helps, too(. There is no shortage of companies to advertise on reddit, but we want the right ones advertising here. Hence, we've created the Nominate Advertisers Reddit Would Hardly Admonish Looking@ commission. We've created a private reddit where a select group of reddit volunteers will submit and discuss advertisers who the community would like to see.

As you have probably noticed, a few days ago we started highlighting not just your friends, but also the submitter of a link and the moderators of the reddit you're reading. We had been getting numerous requests for submitter highlighting due to the recent popularity of reddits like AskReddit and IAmA , and we had also gotten occasional requests for moderator highlighting, so we pushed out what we thought was an innocent change: friends get an [ F ] next to their name,