I once was lost, but now am cofound

Has a cofounder of Reddit been accused of a felony? I, for one, am downright cofounded.

Aaron Swartz, a well-known Internet activist, has been charged with felony data theft—that’s undisputed. The question is whether he’s a cofounder of the popular social news site, a frequent subject of the Dot’s coverage.

The importance placed on the question stems from the fact that in Silicon Valley, everyone wants to be a founder of something, which leads to all kinds of semantic nonsense. (Look no further than the business cards of yours truly, which would call me “founding editor” of the Daily Dot, if I could ever figure out how I can get some printed.)

And, by the way, pointing out that one definition of “founder” is “to sink beneath the waves” doesn’t make you very popular at parties.

There’s a divide, though, between the engineering side of the culture and the business side. Engineers view founding straightforwardly: Were you present at the creation? Did you slog away on code before there was a company? Did you whiteboard and argue and dream? If so you’re a cofounder.

The business side views “founder” as a useful marketing term, which leads to such nonsense as Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk pushing out the company’s actual founders and obtaining the title of cofounder through the settlement of a lawsuit. Or Caterina Fake, the actual cofounder of photo-sharing site Flickr, getting hired on as the “cofounder” of question-and-answer site Hunch after it already had built a team and a product

Hence the puzzling debate over whether Swartz, a programmer and activist who’s been charged with data theft, is a cofounder of Reddit, the social news site, as some headlines described him. The answer from Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian: Decidedly not.

I called up Ohanian to get to the bottom of things, and we had a fascinating conversation about the status of cofounders in the tech world. He’s clearly on the engineering side of the question: The facts are the facts. And the facts, according to Ohanian, show that Swartz wasn’t a cofounder. I have no reason to doubt Ohanian: He was present at the creation, after all.

Swartz seems to have a continued interest in the question, though. When I quizzed Ohanian on the subject on Twitter, Swartz favorited my tweet.

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Founders are fancy, indeed. But do you know what else is fancy? Our new video bumpers. Reporter Fruzsina Eördögh isn’t just observing YouTube. She’s participating, too. These days it’s not enough to have comfortable shoes, a tape recorder, and a reporter’s notebook; you need video-editing software and some groovy graphics. Or so I’m told.

Eördögh keeps threatening to get me on camera, too. While I’ve done my share of CNBC appearances and I actually worked for a local TV station once, I just don’t know if I’m fancy enough for videoblogging. Eördögh is persuasive, however, which is how she keeps getting YouTubers to tell her the stories behind the videos.

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Also, bacon.

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I’ve always believed in the power of hairy-chested dancing men, but I thought the allure was limited to my subculture. Apparently not. The Web’s small businesses are learning all kinds of tricks to get people in the virtual door. One of those tricks are the shirtless gyrations of Dror Mizrahi, aka dancingdror, who will write anything on his stomach and dance for 30 seconds, for the low, low price of $5.

Underpriced. At those rates, he ought to be the founder of something.