You can look through the presents on Redditgifts.com, a site created spontaneously by users of the Condé Nast news-sharing website. Apparently sending holiday cheer to strangers on the other side of the planet frees people up to take gifting risks they would never attempt at the office secret santa — or just wouldn't care to. Some of the better ones, culled mainly from this writeup by Antonio Cangiano:

• A brand new electric guitar, with amplifier.
  
• An undisclosed gift worth $2,000.
  
• More than $600 as an emergency fund for this grateful woman's service dog, matched by Reddit.
  
• A make it yourself dildo for the recipient's girlfriend (he, uh, requested something like this and was thrilled. OK!)

Though the suggested gift value, inclusive of shipping, was $15, the declared average per gift stood at $35 as of yesterday, so these outliers actually give the flavor of a broader trend of generosity.

That said, not everyone has been a good elf; a "few hundred" of the participants have missed the deadline to mail their presents, according to Cangiano's post. Then there were gifts like...

• The person who gave four paperclips as a gift;
  
• An iTunes gift card (recipient apparently doesn't use iTunes — we'll take it though!)
  
• More in this thread about how you shouldn't be rude about your lame gift.

But given an experiment involving thousands of strangers sending presents to each other over the internet, what's surpising isn't that there were a few jerks and some hurt feelings, but that there were so few. We were almost attempted to try and stage our own, before we realized that like half the things in our secret santa gift guide are illegal to send

(Pic: Antonio Cangiano)

Quantcast (Reddit is the lower line; news ranking competitor Digg the upper):

ComScore, via TechCrunch (Reddit is the lower, red line):

The departures of Ohanian and Huffman were anticipated. The co-founders are believed to have completed the "earn out" provisions of their acquisition deal with Condé Nast; the end of October marks the three-year anniversary of the acquisition. What's troubling is that Wired, socked by layoffs and ad declines, seems determined to do to promising Wired.com what it did to Reddit: hinder some real potential.

No matter, for Reddit's co-founders: Alexis Ohanian (top pic, left) is off to a fellowship in Armenia, while co-founder Steve Huffman (top pic, right) will "flee back to Virginia to spend time with my lovely new wife." Sounds like a plan. They'll say goodbye at a Reddit Halloween party in San Francisco. Free drinks are involved — per Reddit tradition — so.... see you there!

(Top pics: Irina Slutsky and saikofish on Flickr)

Wired.com managing editor Marty Cortinas and copy chief Tony Long were laid off last week, sources tell us, though it's expected the two will stay on through the end of the year. The loss of two people, even high ranking ones, might not seem too brutal but for the website's recent history: it lost a quarter of its staff last November, along with a closely-aligned development executive at parent company CondéNet; then in April it lost more staff, including managing editor Leander Kahney, two other full-time employees, an unknown number of freelancers and several writers at Wired Digital's Ars Technica website.

On top of that, people close to the company whisper that the two founders of social news website Reddit, and potentially other staff, may soon be out the Wired door. Co-founder Alexis Ohanian is planning a celebration to take place on the third anniversary of the site's acquisition by Wired Digital on Oct. 31. And there's reason to think this will be more jovial than your typical Halloween party: Three years is a typical outer limit used in "earn out" agreements, in which startup founders vest progressively more money from their acquirers as time goes on. This gives them incentive to integrate their creation into the acquiring company rather than bolting for the door. Ohanian, believed to be hitting his final earn-out date along with co-founder Steve Huffman, declined to comment.

Of course, there's nothing unusual about entrepreneurial Silicon Valley programmers moving on to new challenges. Reddit would likely continue operating just fine without Ohanian and Huffman. And Wired.com marches forward under editor Evan Hansen.

But it's not lost on some Wired.com insiders that the further reduction of Wired Digital comes as New York-based parent company Condé Nast clings to a magazine-centric business model that's been a real disaster lately. After hiring McKinsey & Company's consultants, Condé closed four magazines and slashed magazine budgets, by 25 percent at many titles. And while Wired Digital's already-bled websites and blogs may have strong traffic, advertising and critical notice — they were recently nominated alongside the Washington Post, BBC and New York Times for the Online News Association's general excellence award — they've been included in the cuts.

So how is Condé expecting to survive the next big tumble in magazine advertising, if not with its websites? Through the vision of print side editors like Wired's Chris Anderson, who seems, to some Condé Nasties at least,to have spent so much time on books and speaking gigs he's forgotten to help sell ads — or to try and truly integrate his magazine with his website? Anderson's ad-hemorrhaging Wired print, mind you, has thus far escaped unscathed by the McKinsey cutbacks, we're reliably informed. Despite his good fortune, Anderson is even rumored to be advocating that Wired.com get by on more crowdsourced, written-for-Free blogs like GeekDad. Asked about this, Anderson wrote, "Evan Hansen runs Wired.com, not me." Hansen declined to be interviewed.

Or maybe the Apple Tablet, Microsoft Courier and Amazon Kindle, among other e-readers, will miraculously allow Condé Nast's old business model to seamlessly transition to the digital age, with no real internal changes necessary.

That might all sound preposterous. But it's the best rationale we've come up with for why Condé Nast would starve key websites — the best hope for its future, really — of resources. Granted, it's much easier to remain in a state of denial than to confront real and looming problems. But we thought Condé might have already hit rock bottom and changed its thinking. Apparently not.

(Pics: Josh Russell, Mat Honan and Roo Reynolds on Flickr.)

Also gone: Kourosh Karimkhany, the VP of corporate development for Wired.com's parent company, CondéNet. (The magazine is run separately by Condé Nast, a sister company to CondéNet.) Karimkhany did the deals to buy Reddit, an online news-discussion site; Ars Technica, a rival tech blog; and Webmonkey, a Web-technology how-to site. With no further deals planned, there wasn't much reason to keep him on, we hear. (Photo by Jackson West)

37signals recommends the Hollywood Launch. Release a few hints until the big day, when people flood your site, sent by blog coverage. What happens: They bring the site down. They discover some big bug. You bring the site down for everyone because there was a syntax error. Everyone misunderstood what your product does because your front page wasn't clear enough. They all think it's stupid. The traffic is gone. Hardly any of those users come back.

What you should have done all along: the Gmail Launch. Have users from day one. Give it to your friends and family. Keep improving it based on their feedback. Let them invite their friends. Automate the process, giving everyone some invite codes to share. Codes protect against a premature slashdotting. Iterate. Take off the code requirement. People will come across it and become real users. Then build buzz. Have some kind of news hook. With Reddit, we switched from Lisp to Python. Start marketing.

(Photo by ioerror)

Hansen shows that Wired is reprising all of its mistakes from the last bubble. "Our vision is to not just be a magazine publisher covering technology, but to be a developer of these things," he says. Of a photo-gallery tool for the website, he says: "We’re hoping to have something to show that will blow people’s minds." Has he been eating Wired founder Louis Rossetto's chocolate?

If I sound like a grumpy old fellow who's seen this all before, it's because I have, first-hand. The sports venture isn't the only repetitive pattern I've spotted. In 1996, Wired bought Suck.com, giving the cultural-critique website enough of a budget to hire unskilled 24-year-olds as copy boys. In 2006, Wired bought Reddit, which lets anyone build their own version of Suck.com (except not as good, because none of Reddit's users are as funny as Joey Anuff, Carl Steadman, or Ana Marie Cox).

What's different now? Oh, sure, we can talk about Internet adoption, broadband, open-source software. Whatever. What has really changed is that now, instead of public shareholders funding Wired's wild experiments, advertisers are willing to foot the bill.

And that is perhaps the biggest reason for Hansen's newfound enthusiasm. He's looking forward to putting ads for sugary electrolyte drinks on his new sports blog. Which only makes us think of OK Soda.

When Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto ran the magazine and HotWired in the 1990s — a period, I should disclose, which includes my employment there — he never stopped talking about the company's seemingly limitless future. His pitch, tinged with equal parts Barnum and McLuhan, always boiled down to this: "Get Wired." I chided Hansen for being too low-key about Wired's online successes, and its new ventures, like the TBD HotWired. Rossetto saw no conflict between being a journalist and a marketer. He believed that while Wired reported on the digital revolution, HotWired would live it. He would never have described a product as "TBD." He would have gone with "TBA" instead: to be amazing.

HotWired FAQ

What Is HotWired?
HotWired is new thinking for a new medium. We call it a cyberstation, a suite of vertical content streams about the Digital Revolution and the Second Renaissance with an integrated community space. While HotWired is currently bound by technological limitations that restrict bandwidth, it represents the genetic blueprint that will evolve into the overarching media environment of the next century.

At the core of HotWired's editorial is point of view. We are not in the content business, we are in the context business. People today don't have the time or inclination to make sense of the data flood. HotWired is Wired's answer to the need for professionalism in a new medium that has been filled until now with something that resembles public access television programming.

HotWired is live, twitching, the real-time nervous system of the planet.

What Does HotWired Look Like?
HotWired is a stunning reinterpretation of the World Wide Web. Developed by Creative Director Barbara Kuhr of the award-winning design firm Plunkett + Kuhr, HotWired's look is clean and bright, filled with playful logos by Dutch designer Max Kisman and bursting with world-beat colors.

HotWired can be accessed on the Internet via the World Wide Web and a client application such as Mosaic or NetScape (though be warned, NCSA Mosaic for Windows has a bug which makes it unusable).

How Is HotWired Different?
HotWired doesn't look like any online service out there - it zigs where all the others zag. (HotWired's unofficial design watchword was "war on bevelled edges.") Its content and perspective are as innovative as those of its mothership, Wired magazine, while at the same time being utterly different. Its community space is technologically unrivalled - the first graphical conferencing system for the World Wide Web.

Isn't Advertising Anathema on the Net? The Net community does indeed react negatively to invasive advertising - the kind of spamming conducted recently by the Arizona lawyers Canter and Siegel, which elicited a massive rejection by the Net's immune system. The advertising on HotWired is the opposite of invasive.

Each advertiser is accessible only through a single discreet banner at the head of a content section. Most advertising is 90 percent persuasion and 10 percent information; advertising on HotWired reverses this ratio. And the privacy of members is guaranteed by HotWired's unqualified commitment to never divulge a member's personal information to advertisers.

Why HotWired, Why Now?
Because while Big Media and the telecom behemoths have been busy forming "strategic alliances" to build the "information superhighway" and sending out press releases about the tests they're launching any day now, thousands of companies and millions of people have quietly built a new interactive medium called the Internet.

This medium is not magazines with buttons, any more than television was radio with pictures. It's a new medium with a new aesthetic, a new commercial dynamic.

Many media companies shovel their leftovers into the online world and call it content. HotWired is not one of them.

Where Wired is a clear signpost to the next level, HotWired is operating from that next level. HotWired is a constantly evolving experiment in virtual community. It's Way New Journalism. It's Rational Geographic.

Today is like 1948; a new medium has reached critical mass. We're trying to help define the future of that medium before it ends up like television.

So if you're looking for the soul of our new medium in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get HotWired.

What Does HotWired Cost?
HotWired is free to members. HotWired's revenue model is similar to broadcast media - content supported by sponsors. HotWired's sponsors are some of the bluest chip advertisers in America, including IBM, AT&T, Volvo, Sprint, MCI, Zima (Coors), Internet Shopping Network (Home Shopping Network), Club Med, etc.

What Hotwired Is Not HotWired is not Wired magazine with another name (Wired works perfectly well in print, thank you). It's not a so-called online magazine (print content reduced to ASCII and shoveled into another medium, narrowband interactive). It's not video-on-demand (a pie-in-the-sky marketing concept created by out-of-touch old-media executives to justify their headlong rush into a new medium they don't understand, broadband interactive). It's not an online service like Prodigy or AOL (now rendered obsolete by the explosion of interest in the Internet and the development of the Web and graphical browsers).

And like Wired before it, HotWired is not a cold, marketing concept, but the heartfelt expression of the passion of its creators.

My only regret is that we didn't have this show back when reddit saved Mister Splashy Pants. I'm working on getting some footage of Jim Lehrer saying "Mister Splashy Pants."

Click to expand the image.

1. A pull-down menu replaces the old navigtional bar.
2. There's more space between each submissions
3. Reddit added new momentum arrows to indicate if a story is rising or falling in popularity.
4. Users can now sort by "controversy." "A link can have 0 points but 100 up and 100 down votes," and that, a Reddit engineer told Csutoras, is "something that definitely merits some attention."

As the Reddit "Drankkit" world tour went on, making stops in Silicon Valley and New York , up went the traffic to the site.

The correlation between free beer and traffic is one of those things you always instinctively knew, but never had the proof to back it up. And to think all the time and money wasted on search engine optimization and linkwhoring, when you could just booze up your users. Liquor is quicker.

You'll recall Jakob Lodwick, the always-naked Vimeo founder and geek-lusting girlfriend Julia Allison, Star's professional pretender. Dubbed Jakulia by a notorious Manhattan gossip — Allison herself — the pair were set to make or break Reddit's party with a rumored late-night appearance.

But in the meantime, the booze flowed freely at Hanger bar between Avenues B and C. Here are two of the founders, Huffman and, in the background, Ohanian. Next to Huffman is his fiancé, Katie Babiarz.

While you're admiring the obnoxiously handsome couple, here's a tidbit to bring them back to earth. I learned from Huffman, that, among his college friends, other than a penchant for right-wing conspiracy theories, he's most known for habitually forgetting to flush. Alas, poor Huffman: successful, handsome and engaged to a beautiful woman, but with a circle of friends who can only remember that his shit still stinks.

Here's a better shot of Ohanian. No word on his bathroom habits.

Things got rowdier as the night went on. Well into the sloshing, Ohanian got the bright idea to turn off the music and host an imprompt Q&A session. He got exactly two questions from the packed crowd. One from a woman I'd seen dancing feet away from the founder most of the night.

"How does one start a — when are we going to have intercourse?" she shouted.

"When is Julia Allison getting here?" shouted another. The music returned.

Still, despite the hooch-induced frivolity, you people are still ... you people. Even in Silicon Alley. Solo cups and BlackBerrys? Sick.

But sicker? Your unhealthy obsession with Jakulia, people. All night the whispers were hardly whispers.

"When's Julia Allison coming?"

"What about Jakob Lodwick?"

"Will he be wearing a shirt?"

It went on and on like this all night. But, then, suddenly like a TV dropped in the bathtub, a shock shot through the Hanger bar. You begged, so fine, here they are in all their ... something. Jakulia and a guy.

And then they left.

"He would have been welcome," says Conde Nast's Kourosh Karimkhany of Swartz. "But I don't think he could have come to the bar. He just turned 20." What is it with big media and their unseemly interest in barely-legal entrepreneurs?

Of drinking age — and deserving of a pint — is cofounder Chris Slowe. Dr. Slowe, that is. Besides the one-year anniversary of the acquisition, he's also celebrating his recently awarded Ph.D. Before I get to hear about his thesis, Leah Culver shows up. The Pownce engineer is bubbly as ever, but she has some bad news — she and Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick have broken up. (More on that later.)

The evening is capped off, though, with an appearance by Frank Chu, the famous "12,000 Galaxies" signholder of downtown San Francisco. Now he's up to 725,000 galaxies, whatever that means. On that absurd note, I make my exit. Impressive, perhaps, that Reddit has maintained something of its startup vibe a year after its acquisition. Less impressive that free beer, on Conde Nast's tab, is what it took to spur a big geek turnout.

• The French Embassy is having a soirée at 5:30 at Mighty in Potrero Hill. [Facebook]
• The Wall Street Journal's Don Clark leads the Third Annual Tech Industry Charity Jam at 7 p.m. at the Rickshaw Stop. [Jam Party Invite (pdf)]
• The DNA Lounge, owned by early Netscape employee turned nightclub promoter Jamie Zawinski, hosts Ignite SF, a networking event with presenters ranging from Charles River Ventures VC Susan Wu to San Francisco mayoral candidate Chicken John. [Upcoming]
• Conde Nast's news-aggregator site Reddit is hosting an open bar at the Gallery Lounge from 7-9 p.m. [Reddit Blog]
• We hear that VCs Eric Chin and Mike Jung are throwing an intimate get-together at Fluid, 2 South Park Street in SoMa, to bring together all of the guests from their monthly Alpha dinners in Woodside.

Got a to-do that's a must-do? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com. Check out more events on our Google Calendar: