The infamous pic. (Photo: Businessweek)

Last night, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced that he was doing an AMA on Reddit. Following the announcement, he immediately vacated the site and did not return to it for 24 hours. As many of the interested Redditors are refugees from Digg, they did not take kindly to this crucial misunderstanding of how exactly Reddit works. Generally, you don't announce you're doing an AMA unless you intend to answer questions at that very moment.

"Kevin just tweeted an Instagram picture at Alcatraz," wrote one user. "Pretty sure he forgot about this."

"Maybe it is symbolic of being trapped in an AMA he regrets," retorted another.

Some time this afternoon, Mr. Rose returned to the thread in order to answer the (mostly indignant) questions that had collected while he was away. Perhaps to make up for his tardiness, he even took the time to record a few video replies to Redditors' questions.

Our favorite response had to be when he opened up about that embarrassingly overused Businessweek cover depicting a baby-faced Mr. Rose making an overenthusiastic "thumbs up" gesture while donning a backwards hat and giant earphones.

Mr. Rose had once explained the photo to Valleywag, but not in such detail. According to him, he was jokingly making the "thumbs up" gesture at the Digg creative director when the photog snapped the picture. The hat and headphones were due to Businessweek insisting he bring props that made him look like a young and fresh entrepreneur.

According to Mr Rose:

"Who would ever want that photo to be on the cover of any magazine? [The photographer] promised me he wouldn't use it....they don't give you any say in that stuff and it showed up on the cover of Businessweek. You take a look at something like that and say, 'God I really wish they would have chose a different photo.' And another part of me is like, 'You know what, I don't care if I was topless on the cover of Businessweek, because it's just an honor to be on that magazine.' It was kind of bittersweet."

Ah, to have the problems of the rich and tech famous.

(Source: Flickr.com/kinopix)

Seems like the folks over at Reddit don't take too kindly to spammers. The Daily Dot reports that at least five news source domains, including some media heavyweights like The Atlantic and Businessweek, have been banned from Reddit. That doesn't just mean employees at those companies can't post links--it means that users can't post links that include atlantic.com or businessweek.com domains.

The Daily Dot writes that upon attempting to post a link from one of these domains, Redditors are "greeted with the following message: 'this domain has been banned for spamming and/or cheating.'"

Reddit admins are on the defensive: "This type of action is a last resort," wrote alienth. "Before taking such a severe action we make absolutely certain that the domains that would be affected are truly at fault."

Erik Martin, Reddit's general manager, also chimed in, writing, "These bans are temporary."

Redditors in r/BannedDomains are tossing around some interesting conspiracy theories about conflict of interest: "I wonder if we would ever see reddit ban The New Yorker (owned by Condé Naste/Advance Publications) based on the actions of one low-level editor working within extremely vague guidelines," wrote one commenter named cityroasted. "Seems like a conflict of interest for reddit to be owned by publisher and then banning their competitors."

As we wrote in today's profile of Reddit's general manager Erik Martin, Conde Nast has little control over Reddit, which was recently spun out as an independent subsidiary--but clearly the two are still experiencing some growing pains. Given the fact that the social news site nets 2.5 billion page views a month, and is a major traffic-driver, would Conde Nast really stand by if Reddit decided to again buck the wishes of its parent company and ban Wired?

BusinessWeek's Douglas MacMillan, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

BusinessWeek is feeling some backlash from a story on the rise of the brogrammers, programmers who supposedly drink beer and pop their collars and make out with girls, just like frat guys. We love a fake trend story just as much as the next blog, but yeesh. Even we're starting to get embarrassed. This is like the time the news media thought owling was a thing. "I think BusinessWeek got punk'd," tweeted TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis.

But did they? At this point, who is in on what joke has gotten rather muddled.

The brogramming Facebook page posted this last week:

Big news broskis. We've been given an opportunity to bring our message to the mainstream media. Various prominent members of the Brogramming community have been contacted by a major publication:

"Hey <censored>, I'm a reporter for <censored>. Writing a story for next week's magazine about brogramming. I know this is more a joke internet meme than a real thing, but calling around and asking people how much truth there is in this idea of club-going alpha male programmer versus the nerd engineer stereotype everyone assumes. You able to talk about this?"

Okay, so the writer, Douglas MacMillan, is halfway hip to the joke. But the story still farts out overserious lines like, "In business, the brogramming culture seems to be confined to smaller outfits" and on the whole gives a highly unflattering portrait of guys at tech startups today, overlooking much of the nuance of the meme. It's self-deprecating, for one, which makes it a lot more progressive than BizWeek gives it credit for. One response to the above post, from Michael Trompeta: "Troll...like you've never trolled before...for example, brogrammers create iPhone apps while getting bottle service at the club to pay for bottle service at the club."

There are a few things at work here.

1. Tech + testosterone is not new.

Look, tech is male-heavy. If you're in a room with nothing but sausage and computers, things can get a little macho. Pound some Red Bull! Eat an entire pizza! MANLINESS! The brogramming meme and its attendant exclusionary aspects—women basically cannot participate in brogramming at any level of seriousness—is just another manifestation of how tech can be a young boys club. N.B.: If any lady can gin up a counterpoint trend, ladygrammers or whatever, we will love you and write a million fake trend pieces about it. Maybe like, really girly "lipstick programmers"? That would be funny.

2. The story assumes an over-the-top stereotype of programmers as incorrigible nerds.

It's true that lightweight programming tools have made programming more mainstream. But it should not be earth-shattering to think that people who program computers also drink beer. Sometimes they even smoke cigarettes and have girlfriends, and even party and do drugs, if they're Sean Parker. (KIDDING.) Bottom line, programmers are not by definition basement-bound, owl-eyed losers.

2a. Focusing on the brogramming pseudo-phenomenon also neglects the more significant segment of the programming population who are socially-adjusted but not bro-y.

"This guy is a nobody making us all look bad," Marak Squires, a coder and cofounder of Nodejitsu, said over Gchat, referring to Danilo Stern-Sapad, the coder quoted so damningly by BusinessWeek saying, "We got invited to a party in Malibu where there were naked women in the hot tub. We’re the cool programmers."

"And I can list like, all the coolest most badass developers I know who are the fucking real deal and not tools from L.A.," Mr. Squires said.

So wait, are brogrammers a real thing? "Life imitating art imitating life imitating art," he said. "It's real now. That's how these things work."

Since the story and accompanying backlash, Mr. Stern-Sapad claims the whole thing is a joke.

And the story, syndicated from the New York Post to the Syndey Morning Herald, is already causing confusion. Computer Weekly just invoked the term in its Women in Technology survey: "With the phrase "brogramming" on the rise (less male-geeks and more cool male testosterone-fuelled coders) women may be finding themselves even more alienated then they previously did." We eagerly await the CNN segment.

3. People who invented and use the term "brogrammer" are being ironic.

Part self-mockery, part acknowledgement of tech's new sheen of cool (thanks to the media, again), part pillorying of real bros, and part Dadaist joke, the existence of the brogramming meme belies its true character. Bros, in the traditional sense, are not self-aware. Bros lift weights and go on spring break. Bros are not ironic. (While we're on the subject of irony, don't even ask us about scrogrammers.)

Lotus pose.

Time magazine was almost finished closing its latest issue, which will hit stands Friday, when the news of Steve Jobs' death broke. So for the first time in what AdWeek says may have been three decades, the magazine stopped the presses. Mr. Jobs' image now graces the front cover for the eighth and perhaps final time. Its entire 'feature well' will also be devoted to covering his legacy.

Businessweek and Newsweek also have special issues planned, the former an ad-free tribute. Wired.com's striking black homepage is also still ad-fee--featuring only an image of Mr. Jobs and quotes mourning his passing--just as it did last night. But Time's issue is of particular note because it will feature an essay from Walter Issacson, Mr. Jobs' biographer, who just had his deadline pushed up by Simon & Schuster.

Mr. Issacson's essay is behind a paywall, but Fortune.com has excerpted the part where he describes the day Mr. Jobs first tried to pitch him on writing his life's story.

In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from him. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I'd worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn't heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He'd be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted, instead, to take a walk so we could talk.

That seemed a bit odd. I didn't yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.

But I later realized that he had called me just before he was going to be operated on for cancer for the first time. As I watched him battle that disease, with an awesome intensity combined with an astonishing emotional romanticism, I came to find him deeply compelling, and I realized how much his personality was ingrained in the products he created. His passions, demons, desires, artistry, devilry and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business, so I decided to try to write his tale as a case study in creativity.

It seems Mr. Jobs' love of walking was a constant. As Daring Fireball's John Gruber noted poignantly in this tribute, even four months ago at Apple's WWDC conference, Mr. Gruber noticed "fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels" of Mr. Jobs' uniform gray New Balance 993s.