`BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti.

BuzzFeed has partnered with CNN to access its archives to create a thrilling YouTube channel focusing on "serious news events." [TechCrunch]

Two major Hollywood studios, Warner Bros. and NBC Universal, have reportedly asked Google to scrub the search results of Kim Dotcom’s Mega hosting website for containing copyrighted material. [TorrentFreak]

Here's an in-depth look at #Hashtags: Are they Facebook's missing link to the pop culture? [CNET]

Of course Google is exploring the idea of using blimps to deliver Wifi to parts of Africa and Asia. [Science Recorder]

Welp, don't be too alarmed but Chinese hackers have reportedly gained access to very advanced designs for U.S. weapon systems. [The Verge]

Someday! (Photo: CornellNYC Tech)

Fast money, fast people. Venmo Payouts is now saving businesses time and paper (as in checks, not cash) with an API designed for  sending money directly to service providers. Any phone number or email address can be used to pay babysitters, dog walkers or masseuses via a single API call. Venmo acts as the middle man, collecting your top-secret bank information and using it for the transaction.

Buzz-Feed us business. BuzzFeed has a new business editor for its coming-soon business section. Peter Lauria, former editor-in-charge of U.S. technology, media, and telecom coverage for Reuters, will lead Buzzfeed’s expansion into Wall Street later this spring. Look out for “13 Most Daring Corporate Investments Announced Using These Great Photos of Cats.”

Kids Say the Darnedest Things. StoryBots has three new apps launching, including KidQuoter for iPhone. Since your friends already love the adorable Instas depicting your kid holding a cookie, or a baseball, or a tissue full of snot, why not also share every brilliant thing your kid says? Let the world in on Timmy’s latest potty training insights using a custom background and custom costume.

Campfires for adults. No, ITP Camp is not an opportunity to toast marshmallows and sing Kumbaya around the fire. This camp is for adults: For a small fee, non-students and working professionals are invited to participate in a month-long summer program designed to facilitate the sharing of skills, criticisms and passions between members. Who needs formal grad school? Anyone who joins can propose and lead sessions like “Startup Fundraising Basics,” or “3D Printing.” Maybe proposing a “Nature Hike” isn’t completely off the table?

Hacker Roundup. Retouch your headshots and update your resumes because the FinTech Hackathon is swiftly approaching. Beginning on April 6, developers and designers working individually or in teams will have 24 hours to code and demo hacks to a pro panel. While we do love fun-but-pointless hacks (like one that lets you replay your favorite YouTube video over and over with absolutely no effort), this hackathon will focus its energy on financial technology platforms.

Congratulations are in order. IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program has named True Office a 2013 Laureate. The award honors organizations that have utilized technology “to promote and advance public welfare, benefit society or change the world’s business for the better.” True Office, with compliance games made to help companies save money by identifying risk, has probably advanced the public welfare of somebody, somewhere.

Chronicles of Campus Expansion. The City Planning Commission has approved Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island Campus Plan; now it’s the City Council’s turn to review the idea. If the City Council agrees to move the plan forward, Cornell Tech will break ground on Roosevelt Island in 2014.

Tee-rific news. Adam Schwartz of Busted Tees and Josh Abramson of CollegeHumor are joining forces to launch TeePublic, a Kickstarter-like platform specifically for t-shirts and newbie (or even professional) designers. Find out how you too can become an Internet-famous t-shirt designer with this nifty video:

This reporter did not go into an art profession for very obvious reasons.

Your Facebook profile photo is one of the first things that people notice when they browse your profile. Whether it's a meme or a picture of a cat or an actual photo of yourself, what you put in that little square space supposedly says volumes about who you are online.

Jeff Greenspan, an ex-Facebook employee who now works as BuzzFeed's chief creative officer, wanted to find a way that people could connect with each other through the visual information they offer on their profiles in a clever and creative way. Along with his co-creator Ivan Cash and Rally Interactive, the two devised a plan to "let users celebrate each other" with a site called Selfless Portraits.

"On Facebook you're connected, but you’re still kind of separated from the screen by this layer of technology," Mr. Greenspan told us by phone. "So we thought, 'Is there a way people can use this technology as a human experience?' Well, the Facebook profile is a very human visual part of the Facebook experience. What if you actually stopped and ponder one of them?"

That's how the duo came up with the idea to draw profile pictures in a collaborative project. But you're not just drawing your friends--the site, which uses Facebook Connect to collect your profile photo, matches you up with a random stranger to draw. Once you've done your first drawing, your photo is entered into the collective drawing pot until it's assigned to another user. The result is a cool gallery of artistic renderings of Facebook profile pictures, from elementary stick drawings to quality portraits.

"We now have a real interesting collection of people from all over the world," Mr. Greenspan said. "And not only do we have drawings from all over the world, but some real crazy kind of humor has been displayed by users." (Like this portrait, where a giraffe makes a random cameo.)

"My goal with Selfless Portraits was to create an experience that uses the Facebook platform to allow people to have a deeper, more meaningful connection with another human being," Mr. Cash said in a prepared statement (he's currently on a "silent retreat" and thus unavailable for interviews). "My hope is that, after engaging with the project, people will feel encouraged to think a little bit more about places in their life where connection and/or creativity is possible."

You don't need any particular artistic ability to participate. This reporter is a horrible drawer and yet still composed a two minute sharpie portrait of a man from Brazil. "Do you think this looks like this person?" we asked a co-worker, holding the portrait up to the photo for a side-by-side comparison. "I don't think that looks like any person," he responded. Touche.

To date, the site has collected over 12,000 portraits and 17,000 users, averaging about 400 submissions a day. Mr. Greenspan said the duo would love to have a showing of the portraits in an exhibition space, or even compile them in print form.

As for moderation, the two work with a few volunteers to try to keep inappropriate content off the site, but so far it hasn't really been an issue, perhaps because of the wholesome nature of the project. Mr. Greenspan said there's only been about two incidents of unwanted penis drawings.

"If someone drew a penis on my face, I’d be like, 'Dude why’d you do that?'" he joked.

Well, it is the Internet.

Fake Cord Jefferson (Screencap: Twitter)

Spam accounts are nothing new on Twitter, as anyone who has ever tweeted the words "iPad" or "sex" can attest. But another spam ring has recently cropped up on the platform, and it uses the name cache of prominent journalists, techies and celebrities in an attempt to attract followers.

On Friday, Gawker writer Cord Jefferson discovered a copycat account that lifted his name, photo and bio in order to appear as if the account was that of the real Cord Jefferson. "Ha ha. What is this? Why is this? How do I kill this thing?" he tweeted. Twenty minutes later, BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski noticed the same thing. "Fuck is this account?" he tweeted.

As it turns out, Misters Jefferson and Kaczynski aren't the only media people affected by this trend. It appears that these spam accounts are also following hundreds of other spam accounts that pull the same trick, taking a real user's avatar, background photo and bio in order to make the fake profile appear legitimate.

There's one for actress Chloe Sevigny, Politico tech reporter Eliza Krigman, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and Dropbox product manager Matt Holden.

Celebrity impostors have always been an issue for social networks, which is why verified accounts exist. But the phenomenon doesn't seem to be related to a user's number of followers. Mr. Kaczynski has over 70,000, Mr. Jefferson over 8,000, and Learnvest's Allison Kade, who also has a copycat account, just over 500. The accounts all appear to be part of the same spam enterprise, since they all follow each other.

Weirder still is the fact that none of the accounts have tweeted anything yet. If the point of creating a ring of fake accounts that appear legitimate is to disseminate your spammy message, the spammers are either still building their core base of users or they haven't decided just what exactly their message is.

Users can report the accounts for spam, but that doesn't get them removed automatically. We've reached out to Twitter for comment and will update when we hear back.

(h/t Peter Sterne)

We suppose some things never change: Jonah Peretti and company may know more than anybody about how people share content in the modern age, and may have hit—for the moment, at least—on an effective means of sidestepping the penny-ante marketplace for display ads.

And yet, BuzzFeed's search traffic is being driven by the same sex-0bsessed, semi-literate, craft-loving hordes that have always populated the Internet.

A brief tour through the website's most popular search terms, listed by referral share:

1. buzzfeed: 9.55 percent
2. nudes: 1.14 percent
3. nude ballroom dancing: .86 percent

(NFSW)

4. www.buzzfeed.com: .67 percent
5. katrina smirnoff playboy: .55 percent
6. penis size chart: .46 percent

7. creative science fair ideas: .46 percent

"Sorry, had to cover the print, to prevent further plagiarizing." (Photo: Flickr, OakleyOriginals)

It's worth noting that, per Compete, Google accounted for a little more than 6 percent of BuzzFeed's traffic in December. Meanwhile, we'll spare you the full list, but suffice it to note, 20 of the top 50 referral terms were people looking for nude pics.

Some of our other favorites:

9. 20 year old that dont age: .4 percent
10. taylor swift nude pics: .39 percent
11. amuture women on face book photos: .39 percent
12. pictures of animals: .39 percent

(Photo: Flickr, robandstephanielevy)

18. watch wwe smackdown 12 28 12: .3 percent
19. nicki minaj ass: .29 percent
20. muslim letter to santa: .29 percent
21. kate upton scissors full: .29 percent

Also:

32. grilled cheese sandwich recipes: .24 percent
40. "common additional colors are pink, purple, yellow, orange,": .21 percent
46. sexual arousal video: .19 percent
57: nasty nasty blackheads that are so huge they need popping: .18 percent

Ladies and gentleman, we give you the "next great media company!"

Update (12:53) p.m.: BuzzFeed press director Ashley McCollum emails Betabeat the following:

Hey Patrick -

On the record.

Apparently you and a few perverted Google searchers are the only people looking at this content.  86% of our traffic is social, the search results you are highlighting are mostly user posts from a previous era of BuzzFeed, and the salacious nature of many Google searches is not a surprise to anyone with familiarity with search behavior. For example, the #1 keyword sending traffic to Betabeat.com is "xxx!" Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/betabeat.com#keywords

Thanks!

Ashley

Thanks, Ashley! May those perverted Google searchers fade quietly into BuzzFeed's past. (Not to split hairs, but "xxx" ranks fourth in our search terms.)

Secretly seething? (Photo: rosiesays.com)

While browsing our Google Reader this morning, we came across this list of wacky interview questions compiled by Glassdoor.com. You know the drill: "How many cows are in Canada?" (Correct answer: Who cares?) However, we were reminded of our favorite party game, which we haven't played in quite some time, wherein we investigate God-only-knows-how-reliable Glassdoor reviews of our favorite startups.

Let's just say there are some very unhappy underlings running around Silicon Alley.

Cash-rich Buzzfeed has just one review dating from May, written by a former senior developer who called it an "overall good place to work" and said his boss had "an insanely good sense of humor." But he adds,

Cons – Technology stack is kind of old. I left to work with newer shinier toys.

Advice to Senior Management – Encourage more of a hacker culture. Consider internal hack days.

We imagine $19 million will go a long way to upgrading software.

Tumblr, despite its gazillion page views, also has just one tremendously laconic review. The anonymous currently employee summed the place up as "addictive." Pros: "a lot of nice people." Cons: "when the site go's down." Let's assume this wasn't someone working within the company's editorial operation.

There are only three Foursquare reviews, all by folks who seem pretty happy, though there is a complaint that it's "Not as trendy as other startups. The backlash and snark have already begun." And that was before PrivCo released that damning forecast.

One former Thrillist employee seems a mite put out. Under pros, he/she wrote: "If you like to get drunk all the time this is the place for you. The JackThreads part of the company is doing wonderful." Yowzers! Some of us might call that a "perk." The griper also complains about a lack of office supplies (really, dude? try working in media) and poor work/life balance, and ends on a note that smells faintly of sour grapes, suggesting senior management should "Realize the talents in their employees and acknowledge it." U mad, bro?  

A former intern seems a bit more pleased with the experience, though: “Not once was there a day I wasn't ecstatic to go to work at Thrillist.” Okay kid, you don't have to impress the boss anymore.

ZocDoc has a whopping 62 reviews, almost half of which gave the place five stars. But that doesn't mean there aren't a few malcontents: eight reviews fall under "very dissatisfied."  The most recent unhappy review, posted five weeks ago by someone calling himself a current employee, complained of a "Sketchy and offensive office enviroment [sic]." Details, please! Another review, dating from October, advises the higher-ups:

Sell to a big firm. None of you know what you are doing. Maybe it is time to get grown ups in the door.

Of course, we've already made mention of complaints regarding Gilt Groupe. The bulk of the total reviews are either satisfied or at least neutral, but here's a very unhappy operations employee writing in August:

Management is cliquey and condescending. They push you too hard. Your job is below them and they don't offer to help with what you do when you are overwhelmed. Instead, they try to figure out better 'processes' and point the finger. Never been so unhappy with a department in my years experience in the job force and I'm not the first one of my co-workers to say that.

Our personal favorite, however, is the March 2012 review that lists the pros as "free granola and advice and a computer" and the cons as "unstable and strange and weird."

If there's one thing we've learned covering Silicon Alley, it's that a little free food goes a long way toward pacifying employees.

Mr. Hippeau. (Photo: David Yellen via Ad Age)

When we last spoke with Eric Hippeau, the Huffington Post mafioso was discussing Lerer Ventures' new $36 million fund. Today, the early-stage investment firm is announcing two new hires to help it manage and grow its considerable portfolio.

Max Stoller, a recent NYU graduate whose hackathon apps we've covered in the past, will be joining Lerer Ventures as an analyst. Mr. Stoller, a HackNY veteran, worked as an engineer at Hyperpublic--a company founded by LV managing director Jordan Cooper and sold to Groupon--as well as on the platform team at Foursquare, both while in school. And, yes, if that makes you  wonder, you probably did college wrong.

LV also brought on Nicola Korzenko as portfolio support manager before the holidays, coordinating help for LV's startups. Ms. Korzenko previously worked at Signpost, which is backed by Google Ventures and Spark Capital, and Creative Artists Agency.

"Max is someone that we’ve known for quite a while, and he’s well known in New York," Mr. Hippeau told Betabeat when we mentioned running into him at a hackathon or two. "His job is outreach into the marketplace to make sure that we know all the budding entrepreneurs, specifically the younger ones--that they know who we are, that we understand what people are doing," he added. Mr. Stoller will focus on the emerging entrepreneurs coming out of school or doing hackathons. "He knows the young people to know much better than we do," Mr. Hippeau added.

LV began investing the new fund in October and has made about eight different commitments thus far, Mr. Hippeau said. Not all of those are public, but the firm grabbed headlines last week when it participated in a $19.3 million Series D for BuzzFeed only a year after investing in BuzzFeed's $15.5 million Series C.

BuzzFeed reportedly expected to bring in $20 million in revenue last year. So was there any truth to the rumor that investors expect them to triple that in 2013? "Oh my God, no! I don’t think anybody expects it to triple," Mr. Hippeau said. "That would be pressure!" He wouldn't confirm the $20 million figure, but said investors do "expect them to be on a strong growth path, which they are."

Naturally, the path Mr. Hippeau was referring to is paved with that new media cure-all: social advertising. "As you know, [BuzzFeed has] always turned back any kind of monetization that relies on banner or traditional display. They had plenty of opportunities to sell a lot of that. Now they found a model which scales, which is attractive to large brands, and they’re just at the very beginning of trying to take advantage of that," he said.

Do BuzzFeed's sponsored stories count as "native advertising?" we asked. "I never quite understood the definition of native advertising," Mr. Hippeau admitted. But the reason social ads are extremely attractive to brand marketers, he explained, is because it mimics the same narrative opportunity they have in TV advertising. "The reason why there’s still a lot of advertising on television, even though the audience has moved on, is because it’s still one of the few mediums where advertisers can tell a story. They try to grab you emotionally, they try to make it funny. That’s not something you can do in display." Tumblr's revenue consultant Rick Webb recently drew a similar comparison between TV advertising that can still delight you and native ads.

And what about reports that investors are expecting BuzzFeed, which has raised a total of $46.3 million, to sell for at least $300 million, but ideally closer to $600 million? "I never put a price expectation on our companies. That sounds like a crazy analyst," Mr. Hippeau said. "Look, what you’re trying to do is build a scalable, reliable business, and if you can do that, which is tough, then when the time is right, when it’s time for the company to go public or be sold, then the right thing is going to get done. Then people understand the value that’s being built, and the fair value will be made at the time. What that value is, you can’t tell today."

Mr. Hippeau said LV opted to invest in BuzzFeed again so soon for a number of reasons. "It’s a combination of how excited we are about the company and how confident we are that the company is on the right path. And how confident that the last money we put in is going to get a VC-like return." Whether a "VC-like return" is closer to 5x or 10x, he didn't say.

BuzzFeed also Instagrammed a photo of Mr. Peretti donning said shirt and drinking what appears to be a beer. YOLO, we suppose.

(Photo: Instagram)

New Year, New Guilt On January 2, even as many attempted to turn over various new leaves for 2013, Anil Dash had to go and remind us all that despite our best Code Academy-inspired intentions, barely anyone actually learned to code last year. He tweeted, "So did anybody learn how to program after signing up for New Year's resolution lessons last year?" Judging by the @replies, there are quite a few people no closer to Javascript mastery than they were 12 months ago.

If you're looking for some other promises to break this year, Get Instinct and Greatist will want to teach you how to be healthier and play guitar.

Jammin' The improvisational warhorses of Phish played several shows at Madison Square Garden this week, including New Year's Eve--and it seems several local techies turned out. Among the attendees: Aviary cofounder Michael Galpert, IA Ventures' Ben Siscovick, and GroupMe cofounder Steve Martocci, who found this appropriately psychedelic photo on his camera the next day:

Trippy!

Missing in action was CrowdTap marketing director Ben Kessler, who took to Twitter to lament his absence: "Wish I caught Phish this run but I’m sooo tired. Maybe we’ll get some Hampton shows?" Nothing like being sunburnt and baked.

International Relations When last we checked in with Art.sy, a high-brow Pandora for fine art, the well-capitalized startup was hosting a beachside barbecue at Art Basel attended by Lenny Kravitz and a rompered, dancing Demi Moore. Things took a much darker tone today, however, when the company announced that it had permanently moved its URL from art.sy to artsy.net to avoid potential outages related to the civil war in Syria.

In a press release, Art.sy said, "The move comes following an outage with our art.sy domain, which was down for a period of 36 hours this week due to an issue with DNS servers in Syria." As has been widely reported, the authoritarian Syrian government is behind recurring Internet blackouts in an attempt to suppress activists.

In response to questions from Betabeat, a representative said all of Art.sy's servers were in the U.S., but added, “We also did not want a domain that could be construed in any way as supporting the Syrian government.” Why not the more logical Artsy.com? The site “was not available,” said the company spokesperson. Whoever is sitting on the domain must be asking a pretty penny, if  investment* from the likes of Wendi Deng, Eric Schmidt, and Jack Dorsey wasn’t enough to tempt them.

Art.sy also announced that it was "simplifying" its name to Artsy. Perhaps startup names with a dot.suffix are going the way of CamelCase as well?

Chapel Check-In It’s not just your high school friends updating their Facebook statuses to “Engaged" lately. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley proposed on a dark stretch of beach to his longtime girlfriend Chelsa Skees this week. “She said yes!” he tweeted. And check out that rock:

(Photo: Business Insider)

*Disclosure

BuzzFeed raises $20M to build Snackadium.

BuzzFeed, the Internet's biggest time suck, announced in a press release today that it has raised $20 million in a series D round led by NEA Ventures, bringing its total raised to $46.3. In addition to churning out more image-heavy listicles and starting spats with fellow popular Internet properties like Gawker and The Oatmeal, BuzzFeed intends to use the money to "build the next great media company."

A year ago, BuzzFeed hired its editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, away from Politico in an attempt to broaden the depth of serious news coverage on the platform. It worked, kind of: the site's election coverage was impressive, and there has been more emphasis on longform narrative, but it can be difficult to reconcile serious political news and contemplative pieces with goofy native ads like "10 Easy Steps to Building the Ultimate Snack Stadium"--even if the latter finances the former.

"We think BuzzFeed will be one of the great media companies of the next decade," said NEA investor Patrick Kerins in a statement.

Indeed, look bald-faced into the future of a new new new media company: according to BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, it is "socially native, tech enabled, with massive scale." Perhaps, it's a new iteration of the "mullet strategy" he's talked so much about. Top posts (currently including ScarJo looking like Christopher Walken and "How I Lost My Virginity, In GIFs) lure in readers for more thoughtful fare.

Financing and running a sustainable media company in this day and age is no small feat, and BuzzFeed has the added hurdle of attempting to establish itself as a reliable news organization while also churning out sillier content. This new raise will undoubtedly put more pressure on the company to bulk up its credibility.

Nonetheless, we eagerly await the BuzzFeed post, 10 Reasons We Raised $20M to Write More Things Like "Pretty Japanese Girls React to Drinking Poop Wine." We'd definitely click on it.

U mad?

It seems just yesterday that Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman was one of the most beloved men on the Internet, having converted a generation of readers into fans of the turn-of-the-century scientist Nikola Tesla and spearheaded an Indiegogo campaign to get the man an American museum.

Nowadays, between the rape joke and the angry screeds, he's starting to look like a guy who just can't quite learn when to keep his mouth shut.

The trouble started last week, when Mr. Inman made a tasteless, offensive rape joke--revolving around how his F5 key is a perpetually violated rape victim--in a comic. His response to the backlash landed him in even deeper manure: He replaced the offending panel with a pissy note claiming "anytime a comedian says the word rape everyone jumps out of their seat in protest" and alleging censorship. He finally took that down, too.

Buzzfeed contributor Jack Stuef followed up on the controversy with a lengthy profile of Mr. Inman, exposing his history of work as an SEO spammer and suggesting that Mr. Inman is more hit-generating viral machine than artist. It seemed pretty sure to knock the man down a peg:

Inman’s work was not originally a labor of love, a slow process of honing one’s voice, developing an original perspective and take on the art form, and eventually building an audience. It was always business, always a play to known sources of Web traffic, whether for clients or for himself.

(Let us pause, however, to appreciate the irony of Buzzfeed lecturing anyone on content propelled by built-in virality.)

Mr. Inman responded in a fashion that's become typical: by reproducing the offending article and annotating it with his own responses. On the matter of the rape joke, he basically pleads a bad day and says that, "at the time I genuinely felt like I'd done more good in the world than bad, and I acted like an asshole when I saw myself being vilified for making one bad joke on the internet."

He also goes into a long digression about how the money from his comics has allowed him to buy a house for his sister and her six kids. "You didn't find this in your 'investigation' of my finances because I never talk about it." (Except this once, of course.)

It all builds to a grand finale:

Yeah, u mad.

He proceeds to republish a tasteless comic that Mr. Stuef drew while employed at Wonkette, poking fun at Trig Palin. (Yes, the one with Down's Syndrome.)

Uh, when do we get our 32 pictures that will renew our faith in humanity?

However, amid the angry red writing Mr. Inman also pointed out a pretty glaring problem in the profile, which is that Buzzfeed's article took a fake profile on something called "SodaHead" at face value, suggesting that Mr. Inman was, in fact, a Republican. (OH NO THEY DIDN'T.)  The piece has been edited to remove the portions of the article based on the misattributed SodaHead profile, with a note at the bottom admitting the error.

In the final accounting, the successful creator of The Oatmeal comes off, frankly, as overly defensive and even as a bit of a whiner. Nobody likes being called a Republican, but the merits of Mr. Inman's work are certainly fair game for criticism. From his response, though, we can't help but conclude that he's used to hate mail from Internet trolls he can dismiss as dummies. But he struggles with how to self-edit (hint: when you start to make a rape joke, don't) and handling legitimate criticism (like maybe you shouldn't make rape jokes).

All we know is, somewhere Thomas Edison is chortling to himself.