The Daily Dot finally emerges from invite-only beta test

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Executive editor Owen Thomas says The Daily Dot has had “the leakiest darn beta ever”: people could read its stories via social networks or the Daily Dot newsletter, but they needed an invite to explore the site. Now anyone can check out “the hometown newspaper of the World Wide Web,” a site that’s filled with stories about Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube. The Daily Dot aims to treat these sites like communities, not technologies. “To the extent that we can humanize the Web, that gives us an advantage over people who look at the Web as a business, as a set of technologies, or as a set of APIs,” says Owen Thomas, who quit as VentureBeat executive editor and joined the start-up on April 1, prompting at least one person — cough! — to believe Thomas’s resignation letter was an April Fools joke.